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Thursday… I found an article on one of my favourite subjects by Kat Harrison. I have read it before, but it is worth a second glance, and if you haven’t read it, you’re in for a treat.

The links section is a bit hot and heavy today, lots of stuff occurring, and some wonderful weirdness going on in the world.

Have a great day, talk soon.

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

The Leaves of the Shepherdess – Kat Harrison

Poetry: William Butler Yeats

Art: Maxfield Parrish / Gwyllm Llwydd

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The Links:

‘Hybrid mutant’ found dead in Maine

Here is the picture of the mysterious beast…

Spiralling…..

Raiders of the Lost Ark…

The Doctor Explains…

Road sign leaves Welsh-speakers bewildered

Snake in Grass claim writer’s critics

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The Leaves of the Shepherdess

by Kat Harrison

(Oracle – Gwyllm Llwydd)

Salvia divinorum, a relatively obscure sacred plant native to Oaxaca, was rediscovered by Gordon Wasson in 1962, when he and Albert Hofmann’s wife Anita first noted its psychoactive effects. Used for “divining” and other purposes at least as far back as the Aztecs, the plant began to be cultivated and used in the U.S. beginning in the mid-1990s.

I had grown the plant — Salvia divinorum — for twenty years, and I knew the scant botanical and anthropological literature on this rare, sacred plant, but I´d never successfully had a visionary experience from ingesting the leaves. Once I´d tried putting thirty leaves in a blender with water and drinking the green slurry, but other than a headache and distinct empathy with a trapped butterfly, not much had happened.

In the summer of 1995 I was ready for another in my series of solo ethnobotanical fieldwork adventures, and so I headed off for a month in the mountains of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. My son and daughter were staying with family, and I had work to do: not only investigating the folk uses and beliefs regarding healing plants, but also a health challenge of my own. For a couple of years following the dissolution of my marriage and the sad, slow death of my father, my heart had not been beating regularly. I´d always had a heart murmur and the strain of recurrent anemia, but this was more disturbing, grabbing my breath away. After one episode with a doctor, I decided I wanted to ask a Mazatec healer to do a ceremony for me with the Leaves of the Shepherdess.

The Mazatecs are renowned for their ritual shamanism, made world-famous by the twentieth-century “discovery” of their ancient practices using psilocybin mushrooms. The curandera Maria Sabina became the emblematic shaman who was revealed and unfortunately sacrificed to Western popular attention. The mushroom rituals intrigued me of course, but I was most drawn to the more elusive medicina of these leaves. I wanted to meet La Pastora, the Shepherdess.

An anthropologist friend gave me directions to an old curandero´s hut, perched above a tiny village in a remote valley of those tropical mountains. I came bringing greetings from our mutual friend and gifts of multi-vitamins and vegetable seeds. I was met with caution, which I felt was appropriate, and interviewed over two days as to my life experience and my intentions. The curandero and his son, who acted as our interpreter from Spanish to Mazatec, agreed to gather the leaves for a session with me.

Ska Pastora, the Leaves of the Shepherdess, grows in small, hidden glades in the upland moist forest of the Sierra Mazateca. The plant seems to propagate itself from nodes of the fallen stems, perhaps with the help of humans who tend their private patches. It is speculated that the species diminished its ability to set seed through centuries of human tending. And perhaps this highly sensitive species — growing in light-speckled seclusion in such a small region of the world — would have long ago disappeared, had it not been for its lovely medicina and gift to human consciousness. Each healer´s patch is a family secret, and the spirit of the plant is known to have a personal relationship with one who cares for her. Not just anyone can pick her leaves and derive benefit from her medicine. One´s purpose must be clean and clear.

Among many indigenous, nature-based peoples, significant plant species are each personified as a being with a name and particular attributes of character that relate to the plant´s effects. The plant spirit is a persona, to be honored, solicited and thanked for its gifts. Over the past five hundred years, a veneer of Catholicism has been laid over the rich indigenous animistic world-view, and stories of the helper-saints have meshed with the perceived primordial qualities of certain plant allies. The Virgin is often identified with plants that aid us; the Mazatecs recognize two species of morning glory (Ipomoea violacea and Rivea corymbosa) that produce Seeds of the Virgin, used for vision and difficult childbirth. Another name for La Pastora is Santa Maria, again a variation of the compassionate Mother Goddess.

We gathered for the session, a late night ceremony before a rough altar that held flowers, candles, pictures of the saints and powdered tobacco. We sat, the family and I, facing the stone wall that emerged from the earth there, against which they had built their tiny abode of tin, tar-paper and wood. La Pastora is very shy, they told me, timid like a deer. She will come only when we have eaten many pairs of the leaves and sit very quietly, perfectly still, in utter darkness, as in a glen in the forest in the moonlight. If someone moves or speaks suddenly, she will disappear in a moment. If we invite her, and are very clear and open to her, she will come, she will speak. She will whisper to us what we need to know and show us what she sees. She may help heal us, or bless us with good fortune. But we must pray and we must listen, and we must pay her our full attention. Do you know how to pray, really pray with all your heart? If not, tonight you will learn.

The curandero unrolled banana-leaf bundles of hand-sized Salvia divinorum leaves, slightly wilted, and sorted them into pairs. Both mushrooms and leaves are measured in pairs, he told me, representing masculine and feminine. He doled out forty pairs to me, rolled them into a long wad, rather like a salad rolled into a cigar. He explained that after he said the invoking prayers and we stated aloud our intentions, I was to eat the leaves. I was told not to hesitate at their bitterness, not to stop until I had eaten them all, and above all, not to laugh throughout the entire session. Laughter, he counseled, would steal away the power of the medicine.

The curandero held our leaves up to the altar, to the stone emerging from the mountain, and murmured a long prayer that included La Pastora, the Virgin of Guadalupe, San Pedro, San Pablo and names of native deities I could not recognize. He signaled me to state my intentions, make my request.

I greeted the spirit of La Pastora, identified myself, asked her to come be present with me that night. I asked, “Please help my heart to become strong and clear and without fear, so that it can pump smoothly.” I asked, as I always do when I enter into relationship with sacred medicine, “What is my work now? May I please see the next stretch of the path?”

I took my first bite, stanched my reaction to the bitterness, and proceeded steadily through many bites to the end. By the time I had consumed almost the entire bundle, I was saturated with a taste that was sharp and fresh and ancient all at once. I had a momentary sense of how very long these people had been doing this ritual, the generations that had sought the wisdom of this plant spirit. Suddenly there was a shimmering, the curandero blew the candles out for total darkness, and within seconds I was completely in another realm, astonished. Some part of me ate the final bite, and I relaxed into another place: I was in the presence of a great female being, a twenty-foot high woman, semi-transparent. I was standing in her garden. There she was, some distance away, at the edge of her garden, near the forest, standing amidst her lovely plants against a small, white picket fence. There were butterflies and hummingbirds flying around and through her. Her great translucent face, the density of rainbows, leaned toward me and away. She moved through the garden, tending her leaves and flowers, leaning over them and standing again, beams of sunlight pouring through her. I felt a great longing for her to move toward me, to touch me, and I realized I could not move my feet from the earth where I stood. I felt the other human spirits around me — the old curandero, his wife, his son and the little granddaughter — and they were all giving her their full attention. I realized then that we were plants at the edge of her garden. She drifted slowly toward us, reached out and ran her hands through us, like a breeze, like a ripple, and I knew in those moments that my body was clear, that when she touched me I was in perfect order. I knew in my bones that if we ever asked for her to touch us, and we gave in exchange our most profound attention when she did, all would be well. I inhaled and exhaled her presence. She circled the garden again and returned to us. When she passed her hand through my chest a second time, I saw a tiny, ornate wooden door in my heart. It was carved with flowers and vines, and had an intricate golden filigreed handle and hinges. As her grand spirit fingers brushed it, I felt a strong breeze open the tiny door and a pocket of hurt blew away into the sweet air of the garden.

There is this enduring memory of my own face gazing out of a plant, and the dark but not unfriendly presence of the woods nearby. As she faded from view and I returned to a sense of the present, I heard the words repeatedly, in both Spanish and English: “Show them the edge of the garden. Les muestra el borde del jardín.” That is my work.

_______

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one of those days for an old reliable source of poetic inspiration: Mr. Yeats. I find that there is always something moving and relevant in his works.

Poetry: William Butler Yeats

The Rose Tree

“O words are lightly spoken”,

said Pearse to Connolly;

“Maybe a breath of polite words

Has withered our Rose Tree;

Ore maybe but a wind that blows

Across the bitter sea.”

“It needs to be but watered”,

James Connolly replied,

“To make the green come out again

And spread on every side,

And shake the blossom from the bud

To be the garden’s pride.”

But where can we draw water”,

Said Pearse to Connolly,

“When all the wells are parched away?

O plain as plain can be

There’s nothing but our own red blood

Can make a right Rose Tree.”

—-

Her Praise

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

I have gone about the house, gone up and down

As a man does who has published a new book,

Or a young girl dressed out in her new gown,

And though I have turned the talk by hook or crook

Until her praise should be the uppermost theme,

A woman spoke of some new tale she had read,

A man confusedly in a half dream

As though some other name ran in his head.

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.

I will talk no more of books or the long war

But walk by the dry thorn until I have found

Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there

Manage the talk until her name come round.

If there be rags enough he will know her name

And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,

Though she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,

Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

—-

Sailing to Byzantium

THAT is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

– Those dying generations – at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

—-

The Fish

Although you hide in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon has set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords,

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

‘Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in’.—Aldous Huxley, Island

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I swear I will write something soon. Very busy, life is hectic.

I hope you like todays’ Assemblage.

G

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On the Menu:

Philip K. Dick Interview

The Links

Painting In Dali’s Garden

The Eleusinian Mysteries: Healing and Transformation

Poetry: Boris Pasternak

Art: Maxfield Parrish

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The Links

From Roberto: Former British Ambassador Says Terror Alert Is “Propaganda”

Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did

Hang the Tsar!

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From Roberto Venosa/ 2 reservations have opened up for this great event:

PAINTING IN DALI’S GARDEN

Dear Friends,

We are happy to announce that, under the guidance of Visionary masters, Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann, the ‘Painting in Dali’s Garden’ workshop will take place during September 17 – 30, of this year. September in Spain, especially in Cadaques, is a most desirable time to be there. The weather is perfect, the sea is warm and delicious, the tourist tide has receded, and the ambiance is one of tranquility, romance and inspired creativity. Perfect for painting. Cadaqués, home of Salvador Dali, and playground to many of the artistic luminaries of the past century, is one of the most romantic and historically creative locations on the Mediterranean. Set on a charmed island, a stone’s throw away from the shore, the beautiful Villa Arenella becomes home and studio to 18 participants who will learn a painting technique that has been handed down from master to master from the 15th century to the present. The updated, simplified version, as taught by Venosa and Hoffmann, makes entry into painting highly accessible for the beginner, and adds significantly to the repertoire of the experienced artist.

This is the fifth anniversary of this workshop, and we plan to expand on the pleasures (if that’s at all possible), by providing more extra-curricular activities, such as yoga and massage, as well as a few added surprises. Also, we will keep our registration fees as they have been in the past: Depending on

accommodations, the rates will vary from $2150 to $2750, and will include the painting workshop, all breakfasts and luncheons, several dinners, a boat-ride/picnic, a trip to the Dali house, a paella fiesta, and an excursion to the Dali Museum in Figueras (new).

Motor scooters and bikes, autos (although unnecessary), are readily available for rent in the town, and the plethora of restaurants and coffee houses are some of the finest on the Med. Gourmet Mediterranean food, boating, swimming, scuba diving, windsurfing, and the myriad of other pleasures that surround the magical village of Cadaqués, are all available to make your creative and social experience unforgettable.

For imagery and complete information:

http://www.martinahoffmann.com/workshops/cadaques_2006.html

For additional information, or to reserve a space, contact us at:

roberto@venosa.com

art@martinahoffmann.com

rjl@venosa.com

Visit

http://www.venosa.com

http://www.martinahoffmann.com

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The Eleusinian Mysteries: Healing and Transformation

For almost a thousand years, the most exclusive society in the ancient world consisted of people initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. Only the wise could be so honored; and wisdom, then as now, transcended gender, class, and country.

“Happy is he of the mortals who has seen this,” wrote Homer. “In the dark kingdom of the shadows, the fate of the initiate and the uninitiated is not the same. Those mysteries of which no tongue can speak-only blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not the lot of other men!”

Like most great cults, it began with a legend long since obscured in the mists of prehistory. It’s site was Eleusis, north-west of Athens. Here Demeter, was reunited with her lost daughter Persephone. The site derives its potency from Demeter, a powerful figure in the Greek pantheon, symbolic of the Earth Mother, goddess of grain, fruitfulness, agriculture and civil laws.

The tale, recounted in one of the earliest Homeric Hymns, told how Persephone had attracted the attention of Hades, the dark Lord of the Underworld, who had carried her off to his realm beneath the earth. A distraught Demeter wandered the land, spreading famine by withholding her gifts of fruitfulness and causing crops to die. While she lingered at Eleusis with a family that had befriended her. Zeus persuaded Hades to return his captured bride.

But Persephone had eaten some pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, an act which obliged her to return to the shadowy domain for a third of every year. Nevertheless, Demeter and Persephone, in joyful reunion, became resigned to the annual parting and taught their Mysteries-an allegory of spring and rebirth- to the townspeople of Eleusis. Thereafter they annually re-enacted the celebration.

Very little is known about the Mysteries. The sacred rites took place in early autumn and the preliminary ceremonies lasted for nine days. They began with a gathering in Athens, when the names of that year’s initiates would be read out.

They met the next day and each initiate would be in charge of a young pig. The procession would head to the sea, and the initiates would wash both themselves and the animals. Then they would sacrifice the pigs and set off along the Sacred Way-the 14 mile route to Eleusis-with much light-heartedness and many stops at temples and shrines.

By the time the processing arrived in Eleusis, it would be dark. The night would be spent near the well where Demeter was befriended, the celebrants dancing by the light of flickering torches to the music of a crude oboe the aulos, and crashing cymbals. Emulating Demeter’s search, the participants would break their dancing to randomly search along the shore, ending their symbolic fast with a breakfast (according to the historian Clement of Alexandria) of barley water, wheat and sesame cakes, pomegranates, lumps of salt and young shoots of the fig tree.

Then, with growing tension, the crowd would assemble outside the telesterion, an immense hall with a roof supported by 42 massive columns. People gathered into two groups: the mystai, whose initiation was deferred for another year, and the epoptai, who were given a password and allowed to enter. On at least one occasion, men trying to bluff their way in without the password were put to death.

Certainly great efforts prevailed to see that no hint of what happened inside was conveyed to the uninitiated. The playwrite Aeschy-lus, born at Eleusis in 525 B.C., was accused of giving away the secrets in one of his plays. He escaped lynching only by proving that he had not been initiated.

Other ancients wrote about Eleusis. Cicero commented, “Nothing is higher that these Mysteries. They have sweetened our characters and softened our customs; they have made us pass from the condition of the savages to true humanity. They have not only shown us the way to live joyfully but they have taught us to die with better hope.”

Aristotle said that one did not go to Eleusis to learn, but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a receptive frame of mind. And Aristophanes added, “To us alone initiated men, who act aright by stranger and by friend, the sun shines out to light us after death.”

And in our era Jung explained. “the ordinary man was somehow liberated from his personal impotence and temporarily endowed with an almost superhuman quality. The conviction could be sustained for a long time and it gave a certain style to life and set a tone for a whole society.”

The ancient Greeks believed in the necessity of understanding the soul and coming to terms with death by abolishing one’s fear of it. This is a worthy state to achieve, and such persons who did so comprised an intellectual elite; self-confident, unencumbered by trivial concerns, truly free. The rites of Eleusis induced this happy condition.

At first the Mysteries attracted people of the locality. But with the rise to power of Athens, the cult expanded to include that city, altough the positions of authority-hierophant (high priest), daduchas (torch-bearer) and keryx (herald)-were always held by citizens of Eleusis.

For most of the centuries that Eleusis held sway, the city remained immune to outside strife. When Persian invaders burned down one temple, it was replaced with an even grander one. The new structure, of white marble, rose under the auspices of Pericles, whose favorite sculptor Ictinus had already achieved fame the Parthenon. The new Eleusinian temple’s “beauty and prodigious magnitude”-230 feet long by 180 feet wide-excited a degree of astonishment equaled only by the awe that its sanctity evoked.

But this too, eventually fell. In the 4th century A.D. Alaric the Goth laid waste to the whole surrounding province of Attica. Shortly thereafter, the Roman emperor Theodosius struck down most pagan temples, and the ruins of Eleusis lay untended and forgotten for centuries. In 1675, George Wheler an English traveler, noted, “One of the first things we came to was the stately temple of Ceres (Demeter’s Latin name), now laid prostrate on the ground, not having one stone upon another, for it lyeth all in a confused heap together.”

Half a century later, another Englishman observed “the bust of a colossal statue of excellent workmanship maimed and the face disfigured. A tradition prevails that if the broken statue be removed, the fertility of the land will cease.” This belief which first surfaced in Cicero’s writings, still had currency at the end 18th century when country folk could be observed dancing around the statue on the Full Moon at harvest time.

In 1801, over local objections, two British academics who had bribed the Turkish governor removed the statue to Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where it remains today. Compounding their theft, they boasted about it in a pamphlet published in England shortly afterwards, explaining that their coup “required equal promptness and secrecy amidst the opposition to be expected from a herd of idle and mercenary Greeks.”

Whether there is anything to the old belief that the fertility of the land would cease with the statue’s removal can be judged by today’s visitors. They view only a region made arid and dusty by the heat, smoke, and debris from the surrounding oil refineries and industry. Doubtless the area prospers judging by the numerous shipyards and by the processing of oil, soap and aluminum. But the ecological cost has been high. For miles around, the trees, turning wistfully toward the sun, appear to be choking from pollution unknown in previous centuries.

Because of its industrial nature, Eleusis is not popular with tourists. This is unfortunate, because the sacred site is only a half-hour bus ride from Athens and here and there you can discover much of its original mystical charm-all the more so, ironically, because of its relative lack of attention.

Immense broken pillars lie everywhere, many with ancient lettering still visible, and patches of blue and white tile in intricate patterns define the areas of ancient floors. Great stone stairways lead up the gentle tree-clad hill behind the remains of the vast telesterion, it’s back to the rock and frontal facade toward the early-morning sun. Underground chambers and what remains of the ceremonial well lie almost overgrown with waist-high grass.

In the adjoining museum are a plaster reconstruction of the ancient site, marble pigs, and statues of Demeter with chipped faces. A tab-leau depicts what may be rites from the Eleusinian Mysteries-but who can really know about this most famous of human secrets? Over it all seem to hover the lovely spirits of the eternal mother and daughter, Demeter and Persephone. And from below, perhaps a hint of a rumble from the everpresent god of the netherworld.

“Then you will find a breath about your ears

Of music, and a light about your eyes

Most beautiful-like this-

and myrtle groves,

And joyous throngs

of women and of men,

The initiated.”

-Aristophanes

From Mystical & Magical Sites, by Elizabeth Pepper & John Wilcock, Phanes Press, 1992.

____________

Poetry: Boris Pasternak

Hops

Beneath the willow wound round with ivy

we take cover from the worst

of the storm, with a greatcoat round

our shoulders and my hands around your waist.

I’ve got it wrong. That isn’t ivy

entwined in the bushes round

the wood, but hops. You intoxicate me!

Let’s spread the greatcoat on the ground.

—-

“But He Was Belov’d…”

But he was belov’d. Not a thing

Could vanish or lose its life’s mission,

The lesser – his talent and kin,

And sketches of his compositions.

You’d just rise up your music stand

And just touch the cold keyboard –

The effort will dazzle you and

You’ll smooth all her wings, strong and broad.

And come the white snows and moon,

And windows’ glass double-braided,

And twigs in the silver galloons…

And time will be suddenly ended.

And you will be shocked in a flesh,

When sunk into concert’s embraces:

Much humbler than we ourselves

Is our everyday deathless.

—-

Dream

1913, 1928

I dreamed of autumn through the glass half-lightened,

Of friends and you in their joyful band,

And, like a falcon, which took blood in fighting,

Heart was descending on your gentle hand.

But time did go, grew older, failed to hear,

And only slightly silvering the frames,

Sunrise was catapulting bloody tears

Of late September on the glasses’ panes.

But time did go, grew older. And the crumbled,

Like ice, was thawing and breaking sofa’s silk.

And suddenly you stopped and stayed the silent,

And dream, like echo of a bell, did sink.

I waked. The dawn was, like the autumn, blackened,

The passed by wind was carrying far away,

Like a straw rain running behind a hay-cart,

The crag of birches running the sky’s gray.

—-

Echo

1915

A little nightingale, for a night,

Means what a pail means for wells, fulled.

I’m not sure, that starry skies glide

From songs to the other ones, truly.

But when her night song fuller rings,

The night o’er the song comes else broader.

A root of a tree better brings

When sop strikes into rooter’s borders.

And if there is wordless delight

Of beauty of leafage of birches,

It seems, that a song strikes a hut,

With chain, that is mighty and tortures.

And then sadness drops from the steel,

And then night dissolves into mire,

And all, till the far ploughed fields

Through it from the garden, is spied.

—-

March

The sun is hotter than the top ledge in a steam bath;

The ravine, crazed, is rampaging below.

Spring — that corn-fed, husky milkmaid –

Is busy at her chores with never a letup.

The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia –

See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?)

Yet in the cowbarn life is burbling, steaming,

And the tines of pitchforks simply glow with health.

These days — these days, and these nights also!

With eavesdrop thrumming its tattoos at noon,

With icicles (cachectic!) hanging on to gables,

And with the chattering of rills that never sleep!

All doors are flung open — in stable and in cowbarn;

Pigeons peck at oats fallen in the snow;

And the culprit of all this and its life-begetter–

The pile of manure — is pungent with ozone.

On the Sound Box: Nick Drakes’, “Time Of No Reply”

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

[Marx, On the Choice of a Profession]

– All of our Love to Jules. (Girl, we are with ya!)–

Good friends are moving… Our Deda and Randy along with daughter Bailey are moving south to Medford. Randy has been teaching Pathology at OSHU for the last 7 years, and Deda has been working as a therapist giving physical therapy for kids with CP and other special needs. Bailey is looking forward to the journey south, and being in a new school. She is a promising young artist, heading into 7th grade.

Randy and I made a dump run with old furniture today… We were driving through Portland in the Land Cruiser that he sold me a few years back. We talked about a thousand things, almost in a rush, but yet in that relaxed way that Randy has… It was a great little journey, kinda bittersweet.. Mary and I are heading up to their house early on Tuesday to help a bit as they get their stuff packed and moved.

We love them and will miss them, good hearts and good friends that they are.

PK stopped by, he has just 2 weeks or so before he graduates from the local school of Oriental Medicine. He is pretty excited, but looking forward to a breather before he sits The Board in October. We loves him, we do. Instead of Burning Man, we will be at his graduation ceremonies this September 1st. I am starting to think of ideas for his web page, something not toooo over the top.

I hope this entry finds you well with yourself and the world. Here is to the change that we have all been a part of. Lets bring about the world that we have dreamed about throughout the ages of our sleeping.

One Love,

G

On the Menu

The Links

The Spirit Of A Buried Man

The Poetry of Karl Marx

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The Links:

Mammoths may roam again after 27,000 years

Greenland melt ‘speeding up’

Give a man six inches and he’ll want a …

French cops hunt mysterious ‘panther’

Return of the Bible Code Bozos

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Tales From Poland…

THE SPIRIT OF A BURIED MAN….

A POOR scholar was going by the highway into a town, and found under the walls of the gate the body of a dead man, unburied, trodden by the feet of the passers-by. He had not much in his purse, but willingly gave enough to bury him, that he might not be spat upon and have sticks thrown at him. He performed his devotions over the fresh heaped-up grave, and went on into the world to wander. In an oak wood sleep overpowered him, and when he awoke, he espied with wonderment a bag full of gold. He thanked the unseen beneficent hand, and came to the bank of a large river, where it was necessary to be ferried over. The two ferrymen, observing the bag full of gold, took him into the boat, and just at an eddy took from him the gold and threw him into the water. As the waves carried him away insensible, he by accident clutched a plank, and by its aid floated successfully to the shore. It was not a plank, but the spirit of the buried man, who addressed him in these words: ‘You honoured my remains by burial; I thank you for it. In token of gratitude I will teach you how you can transform yourself into a crow, into a hare, and into a deer.’ Then he taught him the spell. The scholar, when acquainted with the spell, could with ease transform himself into a crow, into a hare, and into a deer. He wandered far, he wandered wide, till he wandered to the court of a mighty king, where he remained as an archer in attendance at the court. This king had a beautiful daughter, but she dwelt on an inaccessible island, surrounded on all sides by the sea. She dwelt in a castle of copper, and possessed a sword such that he who brandished it could conquer the largest army. Enemies had invaded the territory of the king; he needed and desired the victorious sword. But how to obtain it, when nobody had up to that time succeeded in getting on to the lonely island? He therefore made proclamation that whoever should bring the victorious sword from the princess should obtain her hand, and, moreover, should sit upon the throne after him. No one was venturesome enough to attempt it, till the wandering scholar, then an archer attached to the court, stood before the king announcing his readiness to go, and requesting a letter, that on receipt of that token the princess might give up the weapon to him. All men were astonished, and the king entrusted him with a letter to his daughter. He went into the forest, without knowing in the least that another archer attached to the court was dogging his steps. He first transformed himself into a hare, then into a deer, and darted off with haste and speed; he traversed no small distance, till he stood on the shore of the sea. He then transformed himself into a crow, flew across the water of the sea, and didn’t rest till he was on the island. He went into the castle of copper, delivered to the beautiful princess the letter from her father, and requested her to give him the victorious sword. The beautiful princess looked at the archer. He captured her heart at once. She asked inquisitively how he had been able to get to her castle, which was on all sides surrounded by water and knew no human footsteps. Thereupon the archer replied that he knew secret spells by which he could transform himself into a deer, a hare, and a crow. The beautiful princess, therefore, requested the archer to transform himself into a deer before her eyes. When he made himself into a graceful deer, and began to fawn and bound, the princess secretly pulled a tuft of fur from his back. When he transformed himself again into a hare, and bounded with pricked up ears, the princess secretly, pulled a little fur off his back. When he changed himself into a crow and began to fly about in the room, the princess secretly pulled a few feathers from the bird’s wings. She immediately wrote a letter to her father and delivered up the victorious sword. The young scholar flew across the sea in the form of a crow, then ran a great distance in that of a deer, till in the neighbourhood of the wood he bounded as a hare. The treacherous archer was already there in ambush, saw when he changed himself into a hare, and recognised him at once. He drew his bow, let fly the arrow, and killed the hare. He took from him the letter and carried off the sword, went to the castle, delivered to the king the letter and the sword of victory, and demanded at once the fulfilment of the promise that had been made. The king, transported with joy, promised him immediately his daughter’s hand, mounted his horse, and rode boldly against his enemies with the sword. Scarcely had he espied their standards, when he brandished the sword mightily several times, and that towards the four quarters of the world. At every wave of the sword large masses of enemies fell dead on the spot, and others, seized with panic, fled like hares. The king returned joyful with victory, and sent for his beautiful daughter, to give her to wife to the archer who brought the sword. A banquet was prepared. The musicians were already striking up, the whole castle was brilliantly lighted; but the princess sat sorrowful beside the assassin-archer. She knew at once that he was in nowise the man whom she saw in the castle on the island, but she dared not ask her father where the other handsome archer was; she only wept much and secretly: her heart beat for the other.

The poor scholar, in the hare’s skin, lay slain under the oak, lay there a whole year, till one night he felt himself awakened from a mighty sleep, and before him stood the well-known spirit, whose body he had buried. He told him what had happened to him, brought him back to life, and said: ‘To-morrow is the princess’s wedding; hasten, therefore, to the castle without a moment’s delay; she will recognise you; the archer, too, who killed you treacherously, will recognise you.’ The young man sprang up promptly, went to the castle with throbbing heart, and entered the grand saloon, where numerous guests were eating and drinking. The beautiful princess recognised him at once, shrieked with joy, and fainted; and the assassin-archer, the moment he set eyes on him, turned pale and green from fear. Then the young man related the treason and murderous act of the archer, and in order to prove his words, turned himself in presence of all the assembled company into a graceful deer, and began to fawn upon the princess. She placed the tuft of fur pulled off him in the castle on the back of the deer, and the fur immediately grew into its place. Again he transformed himself into a hare, and similarly the piece of fur pulled off, which the princess had kept, grew into its place immediately on contact. All looked on in astonishment till the young man changed himself into a crow. The princess brought out the feathers which she had pulled from its wings in the castle, and the feathers immediately grew into their places. Then the old king commanded the assassin-archer to be put to death. Four horses were led out, all wild and unbroken. He was bound to them by his hands and feet, the horses were started off by the whip, and at one bound they tore the assassin-archer to pieces. The young man obtained the hand of the young and charming princess. The whole castle was in a brilliant blaze of light, they drank, they ate with mirth; and the princess did not weep, for she possessed the husband that she wished for.

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Jenny Von Westphalen

I have always maintained that every poet is a revolutionary, but not every revolutionary is a poet… Here you will find, that one man was both. His works resound through time, and though some may discount him, he changed the world out of his sense of love and concern for others. He lived a passionate life, and yet his greatest passion was his life companion and wife. This is dedicated to his wild love, Jenny Von Westphalen, who loved him, and cherished him, following him across Europe as he changed the world…

G

The Poetry of Karl Marx…

The Pale Maiden

A Ballad

The maiden stands so pale,

So silent, withdrawn,

Her sweet angelic soul

Is misery-torn.

Therein can shine no ray,

The waves tumble over;

There, love and pain both play,

Each cheating the other.

Gentle was she, demure,

Devoted to Heaven,

An image ever pure

The Graces had woven.

Then came a noble knight,

A grand charger he rode;

And in his eyes so bright

A sea of love flowed.

Love smote deep in her breast,

But he galloped away,

For battle-triumph athirst;

Naught made him stay.

All peace of mind is flown,

The Heavens have sunk.

The heart, now sorrow’s throne,

Is yearning-drunk.

And when the day is past,

She kneels on the floor,

Before the holy Christ

A-praying once more.

But then upon that form

Another encroaches,

To take her heart by storm,

‘Gainst her self reproaches.

“To me your love is given

For Time unending.

To show your soul to Heaven

Is merely pretending.”

She trembles in her terror

Icy and stark,

She rushes out in horror,

Into the dark.

She wrings her lily-white hands,

The tear-drops start.

“Thus fire the bosom brands

And longing, the heart.

“Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited,

I know it full well.

My soul, once true to God,

Is chosen for Hell.

He was so tall, alas,

Of stature divine.

His eyes so fathomless,

So noble, so fine.

“He never bestowed on me

His glances at all;

Lets me pine hopelessly

Till the end of the Soul.

“Another his arm may press,

May share his pleasure;

Unwitting, he gives me distress

Beyond all measure.

“With my soul willingly,

With my hopes I’d part,

Would he but look towards me

And open his heart.

“How cold must the Heavens be

Where he doesn’t shine,

A land full of misery

And burning with pain.

“But here the surging flood

May deliver me, cooling

The hot fire of heart’s blood,

The bosom’s feeling.”

She leaps with all her might

Into the spray.

Into the cold dark night

She’s carried away.

Her heart, that burning brand,

Is quenched forever;

Her look, that luminous land,

Is clouded over.

Her lips, so sweet and tender,

Are pale and colourless;

Her form, aethereal, slender,

Drifts into nothingness.

And not a withered leaf

Falls from the bough;

Heaven and Earth are deaf,

Won’t wake her now.

By mountain, valley, on

The quiet waves race,

To dash her skeleton

On a rocky place.

The Knight so tall and proud

Embraces his new love,

The cithern sings about

The joys of True Love!

—–

Sonnets to Jenny

I

Take all, take all these songs from me

That Love at your feet humbly lays,

Where, in the Lyre’s full melody,

Soul freely nears in shining rays.

Oh! if Song’s echo potent be

To stir to longing with sweet lays,

To make the pulse throb passionately

That your proud heart sublimely sways,

Then shall I witness from afar

How Victory bears you light along,

Then shall I fight, more bold by far,

Then shall my music soar the higher;

Transformed, more free shall ring my song,

And in sweet woe shall weep my Lyre.

II

To me, no Fame terrestrial

That travels far through land and nation

To hold them thrillingly in thrall

With its far-flung reverberation

Is worth your eyes, when shining full,

Your heart, when warm with exultation,

Or two deep-welling tears that fall,

Wrung from your eyes by song’s emotion.

Gladly I’d breathe my Soul away

In the Lyre’s deep melodious sighs,

And would a very Master die,

Could I the exalted goal attain,

Could I but win the fairest prize —

To soothe in you both joy and pain.

III

Ah! Now these pages forth may fly,

Approach you, trembling, once again,

My spirits lowered utterly

By foolish fears and parting’s pain.

My self-deluding fancies stray

Along the boldest paths in vain;

I cannot win what is most High,

And soon no more hope shall remain.

When I return from distant places

To that dear home, filled with desire,

A spouse holds you in his embraces,

And clasps you proudly, Fairest One.

Then o’er me rolls the lightning’s fire

Of misery and oblivion.

IV

Forgive that, boldly risking scorn

The Soul’s deep yearning to confess,

The singer’s lips must hotly burn

To waft the flames of his distress.

Can I against myself then turn

And lose myself, dumb, comfortless,

The very name of singer spurn,

Not love you, having seen your face?

So high the Soul’s illusions aspire,

O’er me you stand magnificent;

’tis but your tears that I desire,

And that my songs you only enjoyed

To lend them grace and ornament;

Then may they flee into the Void!

—-

The Awakening

I

When your beaming eye breaks

Enraptured and trembling,

Like straying string music

That brooded, that slumbered,

Bound to the lyre,

Up through the veil

Of holiest night,

Then from above glitter

Eternal stars

Lovingly inwards.

II

Trembling, you sink

With heaving breast,

You see unending

Eternal worlds

Above you, below you,

Unattainable, endless,

Floating in dance-trains

Of restless eternity;

An atom, you fall

Through the Universe.

III

Your awakening

Is an endless rising,

Your rising

An endless falling.

IV

When the rippling flame

Of your soul strikes

In its own depths,

Back into the breast,

There emerges unbounded,

Uplifted by spirits,

Borne by sweet-swelling

Magical tones,

The secret of soul

Rising out of the soul’s

Daemonic abyss.

V

Your sinking down

Is an endless rising,

Your endless rising

Is with trembling lips-

The Aether-reddened,

Flaming, eternal

Lovekiss of the Godhead.

____

The Wikipedia.org Entry for Karl…

On The Music Box: Chet Baker/Deep In A Dream…

On The Menu

V for Vox

The Links: Art Links From CJ Barnaby & Political Links

Proemium – Why Can’t We Cope with Ecstasy and Euphoria? – Jonathan Ott

Poetry: On August, The month of Lugh’s Games…

Enjoy,

Gwyllm

______________

V for Vox….

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.” — V’s introduction to Evey

(In simpler words) Behold! Before you is a humble stage performer, cast, against his will, by the whims of fate, to the roles of both victim and villain. The face you see now is not just some meaningless costume. It is a remnant of the People’s Voice, which has since gone and disappeared. However, this past annoyance stands courageously reborn and has sworn to conquer the evil and corrupt, who promote greed and the violent suppression of free will. The only choice is vengeance; a personal war held as a promise, but not in vain, for the importance and self-evidence of this quest shall one day exonerate the watchful and the righteous. But in truth, this thick soup of words has become too excessive. So, let me simply finish by saying that it’s my very good honor to meet you, and you may call me V.

_________

The Art Links:

Breaking Space 2 – CJ Barnaby’s Visuals…

Breaking Space 6 – CJ Barnaby’s Work In Motion..

More of CJ Barnabys’ Work, In A Collective Effort: “Hyperpeople…”

The Political Links:

Improvised Explosive Opportunities

Check Out The Comment Section…:The Anatomy of the Foiled Plot in London

As Viewed From The Palestinian World: CNN Presents” slanted propaganda

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Proemium – Why Can’t We Cope with Ecstasy and Euphoria?

– Jonathan Ott

For the sake of freedom and dignity, for the sake of democracy, in the interests of shoring up the battered U.S. economy, it is time to call a truce in the “War on Drugs,” an unconditional cease-fire. We can start by decriminalizing the entheogenic drugs, reclassifying them as prescription medicines as the Swiss government recently did, so that physicians and clinical re-searchers may resume the fruitful exploration of the therapeutic potential of these unique pharmaceuticals, which was so wrongly suspended in the 1960s. These wondrous medicaments, molecular entities which constitute a sort of “crack” in the edifice of materialistic rationality (Hofmann 1980), may be just what the doctor ordered for hypermaterialistic humankind on the threshold of a new millennium… a new millennium which could be the start of a new Golden Age, or the continuation and dreadful culmination of a cataclysmic cultural and biological Holocaust.

The essence of the experience conferred by entheogenic drugs is ecstasy, in the original sense of that overused word- ek-stasis, the “withdrawal of the soul from the body” (Oxford English Dictionary, Compact Edition, p.831), what R. Gordon Wasson called the “disembodied” state:

There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. (Wasson 1957)

More specifically, it is an ineffable, spiritual state of grace, in which the universe is experienced more as energy than as matter (Ott 1977a); a spiritual, non-materialistic state of being (Hofmann 1988(. It is the heart and essence of shamanism; the archetypal religious experience. In the archaic world, and in the preliterate cultures which have survived in isolation into our time, shamanism and ecstasy represent the epitome of culture, the pinnacle of human achievement (Calvin 1991). The shaman is the cynosure of her or his preliterate tribe, (s)he is the thau-maturge, the psychopompos, the archetypal psychonaut journeying to the Otherworld to intercede with the ancestors or gods on behalf of her or his fellows. In the Age of Entheogens (Wasson 1980), in the archaic world, which still lives on in Amazonia and elsewhere, “every thing that lives is Holy,” as William Blake expressed it, especially the living, breathing, planetary biosphere, of which we are an integral part, and holiest of all are the wondrous entheogens, imbued with spirit power. Modern western culture has no official place for the entheogens precisely because it has no place for ecstasy. Dedicated, as we are, to treating the universe as matter, not as energy or spirit (Blake wrote that “Energy is Eternal Delight”), it embarrasses us to be reminded that our planet is alive and that every place is a sacred place.

Even our western religions with their vestiges of entheogenic plant lore (the ever-present “Tree of Life” with its entheogenic fruit; Ott 1979b; Wasson et al.1986) have forgotten their roots and worship symbols, knowing not the experience to which the symbols refer. As Joseph Campbell paraphrased Jung: “religion is a defense against the experience of God” (Campbell 1988). It is as though people were worshipping the decorations and hardware on a door- the portal to the Otherworld (Schele & Freidel 1990)- having lost the key to open it; having forgotten even that it is a door, and its threshold is meant to be crossed; knowing not what awaits on the Other Side. In the Judeo-Christian heritage, a horrendous duality has been imposed; the Divine is the Other, apart from humankind, which is born in sin. Despite overwhelming scientific and experiential evidence to the contrary, human beings are conceived of as a special creation apart from other animals, and we are enjoined to subdue the world, which is matter. This horrible superstition has led to the despoiling and ruin of our biosphere, and to the crippling neurosis and guilt of modern people (Hofmann 1980). I call this a superstition because when people have direct, personal access to entheogenic, religious experiences, they never conceive of humankind as a separate creation, apart from the rest of the universe. “Every thing that lives is Holy,” us included, and the divine infuses all the creation of which we are an integral part. As the dualistic superstition took root in our ancestors’ minds, their first task was to destroy all aspects of ecstatic, experiential religion from the archaic (“pagan”) world. The destruction of the sanctuary of Eleusis at the end of the fourth century of our era (Mylonas 1961) marked the final downfall of the ancient world in Europe, and for the next millennium the theocratic Catholic Church vigorously persecuted every vestige of ecstatic religion which survived, including revival movements. By the time of the “discovery” of the New World, Europe had been beaten into submission, the “witches” and “heretics” mostly burned, and ecstasy was virtually expunged from the memory of the survivors. For the Catholics, and for the Protestants after them, to experience ecstasy, to have religious experiences, was the most heinous heresy, justifying torture and being burned alive. Is it any wonder that today we have no place for ecstasy?

In the New World, however, the Age of Entheogens and ecstasy lived on, and although in 1620 the Inquisition in Mexico formally declared the use of entheogenic plants like peyotl to be heresy and the Church vigorously extirpated this use and tortured and executed Indian shamans, ecstasy survives there even now. It bears witness to the integrity of the New World Indians that they braved torture and death to continue with their ecstatic religion- they must have been bitterly disappointed in the “placebo sacrament” of the Christian Eucharist, which is a placebo entheogen (Ott 1979b)- and it is largely as a result of the modern rediscovery of the shamanic cult of teonanacatl by R. Gordon Wasson in Mexico in 1955 that the modern use of entheogens, in many respects a revival of ecstatic religion, began. Even though myriad justifications for the modern laws against the entheogens have been offered up, the problem modern societies have with these drugs is fundamentally the same problem the Inquisition had with them, the same problem the early Christians had with the Eleusinian Mysteries- religious rivalry. Since these drugs tend to open people’s eyes and hearts to an experience of the holiness of the universe… yes, enable people to have personal religious experiences without the intercession of a priesthood of the preconditioning of a liturgy, some psychonauts or epoptes will perceive the emptiness and shallowness of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition; even begin to see through the secular governments which use religious symbols to manipulate people; begin to see that by so ruthlessly subduing the earth we are killing the planet and destroying ourselves. A “counterculture” having ecstatic experiences in California is quite as subversive (Einhorn 1970) and threatens the power structures in Sacramento or Washington just as much as the rebellious Albigensians or Cathars, Bogomiles, Fraticelli “de opinione,” Knights Templar and Waldenisians threatened the power structure in Rome and Mediaeval times (Cohn 1975).

Since ecstasy was heretical, euphory, or euphoria (etymologically “bearing well”) was suspect, and the same Protestant ethic which warned that sex should not be enjoyed nor indulged in except for breeding held any ludible use of drugs to be sinful. This approach has been aptly described as “pharmacological Calvinism” (Klerman 1972). There was even a time when any use of drugs was considered to be sinful, when herbalists and midwives were burned at the stake beside the heretics, prayer being accepted as the only legitimate therapy (Ott 1985; Ott 1993b), when even laughter and smiles were the Devil’s handicraft. While some might consider these ideas to be quaint, even antiquated, we must recall that the American government has recently denied syringes to drug users and contraceptives to students- saying:”teenagers should be encouraged to say ‘no’ to sex and illegal drugs” (Anon. 1990)- “just say no” being considered to be the best contraceptive and the way to stem the drug-related spread of AIDS! Although we have at least 106 million alcohol users in the United States (54% of the population over 12 years of age), alcohol as inebriant is still illegal in parts of the U.S., and Puritan ideas regarding the sinful nature of inebriation are still dominant and underlie contemporary prohibition of just about every inebriant but alcohol.

Indeed, euphoria has generally been considered a negative side-effect of drugs, and structure-activity-relationship studies have been conducted with an eye to eliminating this “undesirable” trait! In reference to well-funded studies on alkaloids of opium and their derivatives, W.C. White, Chairman of a Committee on Drug Addiction of the U.S. National Research Council noted:

One of the chemical difficulties in this research has been to provide drugs which would prolong the pain control factor so as to reduce the need for repeated dosage and at the same time to eliminate the fraction responsible for euphoria… If this could be done, the same result might follow as occurred with cocaine… rapid decline in the use of cocaine as an addiction drug after the discovery of novacaine… (Small et al.1938)

Perhaps it was a little early to declare victory in the “War on Cocaine,” but White was correct in noting that, in the case of that drug, it was possible to separate the local-anesthetic “factor” of the cocaine molecule from the stimulating aspect, yielding more potent local anesthetics with limited stimulating or euphoric effects, although it has been claimed that “experienced cocaine users” could not distinguish equivalent intranasal quantities of lidocaine, one of the synthetic local anesthetics, from cocaine (Van Dyke & Byck 1982) and that cocaine’s euphoric allure and addictive power have been greatly exaggerated (Alexander 1990). In this case, however, the medicinal effect to be separated from the psychotropic “side-effect” is a local, peripheral effect. In the case of the opiate narcotic/analgesics, the medicinal effect of analgesia is as rooted in the brain as is the euphoric “side-effect,” and it has been claimed that the drugs are addictive because they so effectively change peripheral sensations from painful to pleasurable; that is, that a non-addicting opiate is impossible, a contradiction in terms Szasz 1974). Indeed, the non-addicting narcotic appears to be the philosophers’ stone of pharmacology, and the world has seen a parade of “non-addicting” (at least in pharmaceutical company propaganda) opiate analgesics, starting with heroin in the nineteenth century, some of which have even been marketed as “cures” for addiction (Escohotado 1989a). Some laypersons conceive of Methadone as being the “cure” for heroin addiction, when in reality it is another potent, addicting narcotic substituted for heroin in “narcotic maintenance” schemes.

Apart from the Puritan anti-pleasure ethic, inebriants like morphine, heroin, and cocaine acquired a bad reputation as a consequence of widespread use in so-called “proprietary” or “patent medicines” (Young 1961). The terms derive from the fact that the U.S. government, in the days before the “Pure Food and Drug Act” of 1906, issued patents to manufacturers of medicines, who were required to disclose the ingredients only to the Patent Office, not to the general public; the patents were on the names, they were actually trademarks (Musto 1973). Many of these products bore names like “consumption [tuberculosis] cure”; infant “colic syrup,” “teething syrup,” “anodyne” etc.; “one-night cough cure” and so forth. Typical products were “Adamson’s Botanic Cough Balsam and “Dr. Brutus Shiloh’s Cure for Consumption,” both of which contained heroin, as did “Dr. James’ Soothing Syrup Cordial” (Drake 1970). While opiates are certainly effective antitussives, and good palliatives to alleviate suffering from any disease, they are useless as therapy for tuberculosis (other than soothing cough) and today we don’t regard the use of drugs to tranquilize infants as appropriate. It has been stated that the proprietary medicinal manufacturers were immorally selling palliatives as tuberculosis cures, and indeed the morality of this is questionable. On the ether hand, in those days antibiotics did not exist, and there was no effective alternative therapy for tuberculosis which people might have taken in lieu of the anodynes, which at least made them feel better and cough less (thus theoretically reducing contagion) while they wasted away and died. Indeed, until the advent of the twentieth century, opium and its derivatives were among the few effective medicines available to physicians, and they indisputably deaden pain and alleviate suffering. No reasonable person advocates the use of palliatives in lieu of effective therapy, now that we have chemotherapies for a great number of the ailments which afflict us. On the other hand, what is wrong with more widespread use of palliatives as an adjunct to curative chemotherapy, pursuant to the truism that the better the patient feels, the sooner (s)he will be afoot again? As William Blake wrote in a letter dated 7 October 1803:

Some say that Happiness is not Good for Mortals, & they ought to be answer’d that Sorrow is not fit for Immortals & is utterly useless to any one; a blight never does good to a tree, & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

I say, why not conduct structure-activity relationship studies on euphoriant drugs to determine which drugs are the most euphoric and pleasurable, with the fewest side-effects? This research should be conducted with the same diligence we apply to searching for the best chemotherapy for tuberculosis or any other disease. Why shouldn’t patients have access to the most euphoric and pleasurable drugs to alleviate their suffering and make their therapy as pleasant as possible? As Aldous Huxley mentioned more than 60 years ago (Huxley 1931a):

The way to prevent people from drinking too much alcohol, or becoming addicts to morphine or cocaine, is to give them an efficient but wholesome substitute for these delicious and (in the present imperfect world) necessary poisons. The man who invents such a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of suffering humanity.

Instead of pursuing the impossible goal of engineering the euphoria out of pain-killing drugs, we need instead to find the ideal stimulant, the perfect euphoriant (what Huxley called Soma in Brave New World), the optimal entheogen (Huxley’s moksha-medicine of Island). Gottfried Benn proposed just this sort of research, which he characterized as “provoked life,” commenting: “potent brains are not strengthened by milk but alkaloids” (Benn 1963).

In a perverse way, the first steps toward this sort of “psychopharmacological engineering” have already been taken, in military research on performance-enhancing stimulants, in Nazi and CIA interrogation studies, in American research on “non-conventional chemical warfare” and in recent work on steroids to enhance athletic training and performance. Although the first tests of the effects of stimulants on soldiers, utilizing cocaine, were reported in 1883 (Aschenbrandt 1883), it wasn’t until the second World War that stimulants, in this case amphetamines, came to be widely used by soldiers, and much of the comparative research on military applications of stimulants dates from the postwar period (Weiss & Laties 1962). Similarly, while the Nazi physicians at the infamous Dachau concentration camp pioneered the use of entheogens, in that case mescaline, as interrogation aids, it was American researchers participating in the MKULTRA project in the postwar era who really pursued this questionable sort of work. The use of steroids to enhance athletic performance is a recent development, and the former communist government of East Germany especially furthered this work with a secret cash program during the 1980s (Dickman 1991). As many as 1500 scientists, physicians and trainers were involved in the research, which had as one goal the development of highly potent steroid derivatives active in sufficiently low doses as to be undetectable in “antidoping” tests. One success of the project was a psychotropic nasal spray containing a testosterone precursor which would not register on the tests. R Hannemann, a champion swimmer, described the effects as “like a volcanic eruption,” and said its use was mandatory for athletes who wished to compete on the East German team in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. In a recent refinement, Chinese athletes competing in the 1992 Olympics at Barcelona (along with their former East German trainers), were reported to have used a training potion based on birds’ nest and toad skin, which probably contained many active compounds, some of which are controlled drugs (Anon. 1992). It is regrettable that such perverse (but effective applications characterize the infancy of psychopharmacological engineering- we must recall the disproportionate success of East German and Chinese athletes in recent Olympic competition. I will suggest some more positive approaches.

Nobody disputes the widespread utility and need for opiates as pain killers in many branches of medicine. It is high time we abandoned any notion of the non-addicting narcotic, and instead concentrated on finding the drugs which patients like best. We are not interested in the results of crude pharmacological indices of analgesia in rodents, such as the “hotplate method” or “tail flick method,” but in the results of clinical research with human patients- in this case, I think it would be not the least bit difficult to find volunteers for this type of investigation. Since there is a considerable body of empirical testing which has been conducted outside of the laboratory among narcotic habitues, surveys can indicate promising candidates. Heroin has long been regarded to be the favorite drug of narcotics users, and would be a good place to start looking for the optimum narcotic. The contemporary use of Brompton’s Cocktail (an analgesic and stimulating mixture of heroin, cocaine and alcohol) in British hospices for terminal patients is an example of comfort-oriented therapy which ought to be followed in the United States. I think we will find that if non-terminal patients suffer less and feel better, their convalescence times will be reduced.

There is also a demonstrated extra-medical need for stimulants in our society. Examples are pilots and air traffic controllers who must work all night and require constant wakefulness and vigilance, truck and bus drivers, emergency medical workers, police, customs agents and other officials, and of course, military personnel. By accident of history, caffeine in coffee, soft drinks and tea (and in stimulant tablets, such as NoDoz), and nicotine in tobacco products have come to be the accepted stimulants for use in the above-mentioned professions. I must stress, however, that caffeine and nicotine have been anointed as society’s acceptable stimulants by default, since some of the alternatives are controlled substances. and in spite of research showing them to be inferior and unhealthful. Quite a bit of research has been conducted comparing caffeine with amphetamines, and almost invariably, amphetamines turn out to be superior to caffeine. Studies on reaction time under the influence of stimulants have found that in general caffeine has no effect on reaction times whereas amphetamines decrease reaction times (Adler et al. 1950; Lehmann & Csank 1957; Seashore & Ivy 1953; Weiss & Laties 1962). Amphetamines were also able to restore reaction times lengthened by fatigue in sleep-deprived subjects (Seashore & Ivy 1953). Marijuana (see Appendix A) on the other hand lengthens reaction time and impairs performance (Paton & Pertwee 1973b). With regard to steadiness of the hands, caffeine was found to impair steadiness (Adler et al.1950; Hollingworth 1912; Hull 1935; Lehmann & Csank 1957), while amphetamines improved hand steadiness (Adler et al. 1950; Seashore & Ivy 1953; Thornton et al.1939). In various coordination tests, amphetamines were in general more effective than caffeine in improving performance (Weiss & Laties 1962). Summarizing these and other studies, B. Weiss and V.G. Laties of Johns Hopkins University concluded (Weiss & Laties 1962):

A very wide range of behavior (with the notable exception of intellectual tasks) can be enhanced by caffeine and the amphetamines- all the way from putting the shot to monitoring a clock face. Moreover, the superiority of amphetamines over caffeine is unquestionable… Both from the standpoint of physiological and psychological cost, amphetamines and caffeine are rather benign agents. Except for reports of insomnia, the subjective effects of the amphetamines in normal doses are usually favorable. Moreover, no one has ever presented convincing evidence that they impair judgment. Caffeine seems somewhat less benign. Hollingworth’s subjects, after doses of about 240mg and above, reported such symptoms as nervousness, feverishness, irritability, headache, and disturbed sleep. Caffeine also produces significant increase in tremor. At dose levels that clearly enhance performance, the amphetamines seem not only more effective than caffeine, but less costly in terms of side-effects.

Little of this sort of research has been conducted on nicotine, but tobacco smoking, and the resulting increase in carbon monoxide in the blood, is known to degrade night vision (Federal Aviation Regulations 1991; Levin et al.1992; McFarland 1953; McFarland et al.1944). Although caffeine and amphetamine stimulants have not been shown to improve intellectual performance, and caffeine has in fact been shown to degrade academic performance in college students (Gilliland & Andress 1981), there is evidence that some drugs, like arecoline, the stimulating principle of betel nut (Sitaram et al.1978) and Hydergine, an ergot alkaloid preparation (Hindmarch et al.1979) can improve human learning and intellectual performance. Research into so-called “smart drugs” represents a burgeoning new field of psychopharmacological engineering, which merits scientific support (Erlich 1992; Jude 1991; Morgenthaler 1990; Morgenthaler & Dean 1991).

I don’t know about my readers, but I’d feel much safer if my pilot on an all-night intercontinental flight had taken 10mg of methamphetamine before departing, or perhaps an appropriate dose of arecoline hydrobromide, instead of chain-smoking Marlboros and gulping execrable airline coffee all the way. It is significant that the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which has conducted research on optimizing performance of astronauts, settled on a NASA-developed “prescription” containing amphetamines for the pilots of the space shuttle orbiter Columbia:

On the maiden flight of the shuttle in April, rookie astronaut Robert Crippen avoided the queasies by dipping into the medical kit for a NASA-developed prescription of Dexedrine, a stimulant, and scopolamine, a tranquilizer. (Rogers 1981)

Never mind that scopolamine has been found to impair human serial learning (Sitaram et al. 1978)… Meanwhile, Soviet cosmonauts were deprived of vision-impairing cigarettes, as Valery Ryumin lamented in his log during a 175-day sojourn in orbit (Bluth 1981):

I am dying for a cigarette. I haven’t had one in three months. And if I hadn’t been kept so busy, I don’t know how I would take it. Would give all those strawberries and sugar of our entire stay in space for just one…

And some people still persist in denying that nicotine is an addicting drug (Levin et al.1992)! In cases where public safety is at stake, we need a drug policy based on research, not on prejudice; based on science, not on default and accidents of history (it is worth noting that caffeine was originally considered for legal control along with cocaine, heroin and morphine by early reformers). The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is guilty of defaulting on its obligations to protect the safety of air travelers, by allowing the use by pilots of inferior stimulants which impair steadiness of pilots’ hands and degrade their night vision.

Some might object… even though caffeine is demonstrably inferior to amphetamines for pilots, everyone knows that amphetamines are “addictive” and hence unsuitable for such use. Such people will be well advised to consult the pharmacological literature on caffeine, which has been thoroughly documented as an addictive drug capable of eliciting tolerance and withdrawal symptoms (Colton et al.1968; Dreisbach & Pfieffer 1943; Goldstein & Kaizer 1969; Goldstein et al.1969; Ott 1985; Ott 1993b; White 1980). The fact that 90% of the U.S. population above 12 years of age are regular caffeine users (plus a sizable portion of the under-twelve set habituated to Coca-Cola and other caffeinated “soft” drinks) is ample testimony to the addictive nature of the drug (Goldstein & Kalant 1990). The 73 million 132-pound-bags of coffee consumed annually in the world correspond to 175 annual doses of caffeine (at 100mg/dose, assuming caffeine content of 2%) in the form of coffee for every man, woman and child in the world (Frankel et al.1992a), not to mention massive use of caffeine in the form of tea, mate, guayusa, yoco, guarana, cola, etc. But… can’t “abuse” of amphetamines lead to “amphetamine psychosis” (Cho 1990; Davis & Schlemmer 1979; Griffith et al.1970)? Yes, excessive amounts of amphetamines an lead to a characteristic psychosis, as can overuse of caffeine lead to “caffeine psychosis” (McManamy & Schube 1936). Although “caffeine psychosis” was first described in a patient who had consumed excessive amounts of caffeine citrate tablets (such as NoDoz) originally prescribed by a physician, the psychosis has also been observed following consumption of large amounts of cola soft drinks (20-25 cans in a day; Shen & D’Souza 1979), the moderate consumption of which is also associated with insomnia and anxiety (Silver 1971). Caffeinism can lead to symptoms virtually “indistinguishable from those of anxiety neurosis” (Greden 1974) and cases of “caffeine-induced delirium” have been reported (Stillner et al.1978). There have even been deaths attributed to coffee overdose in the form of naturopathic enema remedies (Eisele & Reay 1980. Obviously, one doesn’t want one’s pilot drinking a case of Coca-Cola or popping a bottle of NoDoz, any more than one would wish to be on a ‘plane flown by somebody who had injected a quarter of a gram of methamphetamine. The goal of psychopharmacological engineering of stimulants would be to find the optimal doses of the compounds which promote vigilance and wakefulness with a minimum of side effects like hand tremors. It is vital to public safety that such research be conducted, and if drug laws stand in the way, this is yet another example of their adverse impact on public health and on scientific research.

As for medicinal use of entheogens, their widespread use on the black market has given us some guidelines, as have better than two decades of experimental clinical use before their illegalization (see Grinspoon & Bakalar 1979 for a review of this early work.) However, new compounds have continued to be developed and tested (Repke & Ferguson 1982; Repke et al.1977b; Repke et al.1981; Repke et al.1985; Shulgin & Shulgin 1991), and some entheogenic plants or plant extracts such as ayahuasca (see Chapter 4) have begun to be used in modern psychotherapy (Krajick 1992), along with the “empathogen” MDMA (see Chapter 1; Adamson 1985; Adamson & Metzner 1988; Leverant 1986). Therefore new studies are necessary to determine which are the best entheogens for the following uses: 1) general, outpatient psychotherapy for various afflictions (Masters & Houston 1970); 2) “brief” psychotherapy in agonious treatment (Kast 1970); 3) long-lasting analgesia in agonious therapy; 4) marriage counseling; 5) group therapy (Blewett 1970); and 6) in experimental induction of dissociative experiences in psychotherapists as a part of their training. I think we will find that a variety of different entheogens will prove useful in various treatment modalities. For example, smoked, high-dose DMT would probably be the most effective drug for rapid induction of dissociative states in medical training (Bigwood & Ott 1977); LSD is probably the best drug in agonious therapy (Grof & Halifax 1977; and DET or CZ-74 or the plant drug Salvia divinorum (see Chapters 3 and 5 and Appendix A), owing to their short duration, might prove optimal for outpatient psychotherapy (Boszormenyi et al.1959; Leuner & Baer 1965). Preliminary experiments with psilocybine (see Chapter 5) suggested this drug could help cut the recidivism rate of paroled convicts (J. Clark 1970; Leary 1968). Instead of going broke building more prisons for drug offenders, ought we not investigate one illegal drug which might help keep people out of the prisons we already have?

Virtually all of the entheogens, or their natural prototypes, have already proven their worth in induction of ecstatic states in shamanism (Halifax 1979; Halifax 1982; La Barre 1970; La Barre 1972; La Barre 1979a; La Barre 1980a; Rosenbohm 1991; Wasson 1961) and in the catalysis of “religious experiences” (Clark 1969; W.H. Clark 1970; Felice 1936; Heard 1963; Leary 1964; Leary & Alpert 1963; Leary et al.1964; Masters & Houston 1966; Metzner 1968; Paz 1967; Ricks 1963; Watts 1962; Watts 1963; Zaehner 1957; Zaehner 1972; Zinberg 1977). Well-known examples of shamanic use of entheogens, which will be documented thoroughly in this book, are: primordial Siberian shamanic use of the fly-agaric, Amanita muscaria (see Chapter 6); the Mexican shamanic use of teonanacatl, the psilocybian mushrooms (see Chapter 5); pan-Amazonian shamanic use of ayahuasca in South America (see Chapter 4); use of tryptamine-containing snuffs in the Caribbean and Amazonia (see Chapter 3); divinatory use of ergoline alkaloid-containing morning glory seeds in Mexican shamanic healing (see Chapter 2) and North American shamanic use of the peyotl cactus (see Chapter 1). The value of the entheogens to organized religions has been amply demonstrated by the 2000-year survival of the famous Eleusinian Mystery religion of the ancient world (an annual, mass initiation employing an entheogenic potion containing ergoline alkaloids; Wasson et al.1978; see Chapter 2) and modern examples of the “Native American Church” and “The Peyote Way Church of God” employing peyotl as a sacrament (La Barre 1938; La Barre 1970; Mount 1987; Stewart 1987) and South American Christian churches incorporating Daime (ayahuasca) as a sacrament (Henman 1986; Liwszyc et al.1992; Lowy 1987; MacRae 1992; Prance 1970). Perhaps using these historical and modern examples as models will aid us in designing institutions to foster religious experiences in modern human users (Hofmann 1989). There is a place in the modern world both for organized entheogen-based religions and the shamanic model of small-scale cultic or individual use; for group communion and for solitary psychonaut “travels in the universe of the soul” (Gelpke 1981)- not to mention for medicinal use in various treatment modalities.

___________

Poetry: On August, The month of Lugh’s Games…

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I pass,

Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

– Andrew Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden

—–

And hate the bright stillness of the noon

without wind, without motion.

the only other living thing

a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended

in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone

raised in a landscape short of rain—

the skyline of a hill broken by no more

trees than one can count, the grass,

the empty sky, the wish for water.

– Dana Gioia, California Hills in August

—–

August rushes by like desert rainfall,

A flood of frenzied upheaval,

Expected,

But still catching me unprepared.

Like a matchflame

Bursting on the scene,

Heat and haze of crimson sunsets.

Like a dream

Of moon and dark barely recalled,

A moment,

Shadows caught in a blink.

Like a quick kiss;

One wishes for more

But it suddenly turns to leave,

Dragging summer away.

– Elizabeth Maua Taylor

—-

As in the bread and wine, so it is with me.

Within all forms is locked a record of the past

And a promise of the future.

I ask that you lay your blessings upon me, Ancient Ones,

That this season of waning light

And increasing darkness may not be heavy.

So Mote It Be!

– Faille, Lammas Ritual

—-

O Spirit of the Summertime!

Bring back the roses to the dells;

The swallow from her distant clime,

The honey-bee from drowsy cells.

Bring back the friendship of the sun;

The gilded evenings, calm and late,

When merry children homeward run,

And peeping stars bid lovers wait.

Bring back the singing; and the scent

Of meadowlands at dewy prime;—

Oh, bring again my heart’s content,

Thou Spirit of the Summertime!

– William Allingham

—-

Blessed be the Harvest,

Blessed be the Corn Mother,

Blessed be the Grain God,

For together they nourish both body and soul.

Many blessings I have been given,

I count them now by this bread.

Guardian of the East, I pray for your indulgence.

Hear me now as I request your aid in the cycle of life.

As your winds blow through fields of ripened grain,

Carry loosened seeds upon your back

That they may fall amidst the soil

That is our Mother Earth.

– Lammas Ritual

—-

Whilst August yet wears her golden crown,

Ripening fields lush- bright with promise;

Summer waxes long, then wanes, quietly passing

Her fading green glory on to riotous Autumn.

– Michelle L. Thieme, August’s Crown

_________

Marys’ Auntie Mary died yesterday in Scotland . She was 91 years old. We heard the news yesterday from Cousin Brian down in California. He and his sister Karin (over at her summer place in Turkey), are heading home for the ceremonies and taking care of the final arrangements..

Auntie Mary was an original… She was born July 17, 1915 in Glasgow. She lived most of her life in Glasgow, later moving to East Kilbride. We visited with her off and on when we lived in the UK. She was famous for a wickedly delicious sense of Gaelic humour, and in my case giving bad traffic directions. She once had us going up the M73 in the wrong direction, luckily that Scotch she had plied us with for the last 3 hours had not addled me to the point of not recognizing the fact that the oncoming vehicles were in the same lane…. 8o)

She was full of life, very active and lived on her own until last year. She will be sorely missed by those who knew and loved her.

Our sympathy goes out to Brian and Karin, and to Karin’s children.

The Gartan Lullaby…

Sleep, my son, the red bee hums

The silent twilights fall

The lady from the grey rock comes

To wrap the world in thrall

My darling boy, my pride, my joy

My love and hearts desire

The cricket sings his lullaby

Beside the dying fire

Dusk is drawn and the green mans thorn

Is wrapped in wreaths of fog

The fairies sail their boat till dawn

Across the starry bog

My darling son, the pearl-white moon

Has drained her cup of dew

And weeps to hear the sad, sweet song

I sing, my love, to you

Saturday… The Green and Tumbling World hurdles towards the Equinox, preceeded by the Perseids… Today we have a crowd of Rowan’s friends over for a celebration of the 16th year he has spent on this orb. So far it looks like the season of silly gifts; Tiara, matching Earrings… and more of the same.

Big Thanks to all who have helped out with EarthRites Radio. I think we have achieved our goal, now to see what the procedures are to bring the Beast back alive. So, stay tuned (sorreee) to what is looming on the Radio event horizon.

Well, have a pleasant one, and may this find you in a good place.

Pax,

Gwyllm

—–

On the Grill:

The Links

Invocation: Robin Williamson (Thanks Lois!)

The Delphic Bee – Jonathan Ott

Poetry Robin Williamson

_____________

Links:

Evangelicals urge museum to hide man’s ancestors

George Galloway Eats Skyy Reporter Alive

Winged Beauty…!

Sky-watchers await celestial show

______________

From Lois in W.VA.. a reminder from Robin Williamson

you that create the diversity of the forms, open to my words

you that divide and multiply it, hear my sounds

I make yield league to you, ancient associates and fellow wanderers

you that move the heart in fur and scale, I join with you

you that sing bright and subtle making shapes that my throat cannot

tell you that harden the horn and make quick the eye

you that run the fast fox and the zigzag fly

you sizeless makers of the mole and whale

aid me and I will aid you

I make a blood pact with you,

you that lift the blossom and the green branch

you who make symmetries more true,

you who consider the angle of your limbs

who dance in slower time, who watch the patterns

you rough coated who eat water, who stretch deep and high

with your green blood my red blood let it be mingled

aid me and I will aid you

I call upon you, you who are unconfined

who have no shape, who are not seen but only in your action

I call upon you, you who have no depth but choose direction

who bring what is willed

that you blow love upon the summers of my loved ones

that you blow summers upon those loves of my love

aid me and I will aid you

I make pact with you, you who are the liquidness of the waters

and the spark of the flame, I call upon you

you who make fertile the soft earth

and guard the growth of the growing things

I make peace with you, you who are the blueness of the blue sky

and the wrath of the storm, I take the cup of deepness with you

earthshakers

and with you the sharp and the hollow hills,

I make reverence to you round wakefulness we call the earth

I make wide eyes to you, you who are awake

every created thing both solid and sleepy or airy light

I weave colours round you

you who will come with me

I will consider it beauty

I will consider it beauty

–”Invocation”

By Robin Williamson

______________

The Delphic Bee: Bees and toxic honeys as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants. – Jonathan Ott

Economic Botany 52(3):260 -266,1998.

Herein a brief review, with 49 references, of the history and phytochemistry of toxic honeys, in which bees have sequestered secondary compounds naturally occurring in plant nectars (floral and extrafloral). It is hypothesised that such toxic honeys could have served as pointers to psychoactive and other medicinal plants for human beings exploring novel ecosystems, causing such plants to stand out, even against a background of extreme biodiversity. After reviewing various ethnomedicinal uses of toxic honeys, the author suggests that pre-Columbian Yucatecan Mayans intentionally produced a psychactive honey from the shamanic inebriant Turbin corymbosa as a visionary substrate for manufacture of their ritual metheglin, balché.

Tradition holds the famous Delphic Oracle was revealed by a swarm of bees, and the Pythia or divinatory priestesses in Delphi’s temple of Apollo were affectionately called ‘Delphic Bees’, while virgin priestesses of Greek Goddesses like Rhea and Demeter were called melissai, ‘bees’; the hierophants essenes,’king bees’. Great musicians and poets like Pindar were inspired by the Muses, who bestowed the sacred enthusiasm of the logos, sending bees to anoint the poets’ lips with honey (Ransome 1937). Some hold the vatic revelations of the Pythia were stimulated by inhaling visionary vapours of henbane, Hycscyamus niger L., issuing from a fumarole over which the Delphic Bees were suspended, and into which the plant had been cast (Ratsch 1987). The primordial Eurasian entheogenic plant soma/haoma, known in the Vedas as amrta, the potion of immortality, was called ambrosia by the Greeks, and with nektar, the other sustenance of the Immortals, was associated with bees and honey (Roscher 1883). This curious lore may represent a sort of mythological fossil, concealing a hitherto overlooked mechanism of drug discovery. I suggest that immemorial pursuit of wild honey, the only concentrated sweet which occurs naturally, could have led inexorably to the discovery of psychoactive and other toxic honeys, while subsequent observation of bees’ foraging habits could easily have led preliterate shamans/pharmacognosists to single out toxic plant species, even against a background of extreme biodiversity, as in Amazonia.

Xenophon’s 4th century BC Anabasis (IV,VII,20) described psychoactive honey poisoning during the ‘Retreat of the Ten Thousand’ in the ill-starred expedition of Cyprus. Countless soldiers in the greek army encamped near Trebizonde in Asia Minor, ate liberally of honey found there, “lost their senses and vomited” and “resembled drunken persons.” Pliny (XXI,XLV) described madness-inducing honey from this area as meli mœnomenon (‘mad honey’) and also mentioned (XXI,XLVI) a medicinal honey from Crete, miraculum mellis or ‘wondrous honey’ (Halliday 1922; Ransome 1937). The 6th-8th century BC Homeric Hymn to Hermes referred to melissae or bee oracles from Delphi’s Mount Parnassos, who could prophesy only after ingesting meli chloron or ‘green honey’, perhaps a reference to Pliny’s ‘mad honey’. It was conjectured that these bee-oracles were the Pythia, hence psychotropic honey could have been a catalyst for the mantic utterances of the Delphic Bees (Mayor 1995). It is thought the source of meli mœnomenon was Rhodeodendron ponticum L., which contains toxic glucosides called andromedotoxins or grayanotoxins (Krause 1926; Plugge 1891; Wood, et al. 1954) found in other species of Ericaceae, notably Kalmia latifolia L., another plant whose honey has provoked poisonings (Howes 1949; Jones 1947). Grayanotoxins occur in North American toxic honeys, presumably from K.latifolia (Scott, Coldwell, and Wiberg 1971). Frequent honey poisonings in Japan (Kohanawa 1957; Tokuda and Sumita 1925) were traced to ericaceous Tripetalieia paniculata Sieb. Et Zucc., and grayanotoxins were found in these honeys (Tsuchiya et al. 1977). Another toxic glucoside, ericolin, is known from ericaceous Ledum palustre L., and from honeys derived from this plant, which caused human poisonings (Koslova 1957; Palmer-Jones 1965). Both L.palustre and L.hypoleucum Kam. are used as shamanic inebriants by Tungusic tribes of Siberia (Brekhman and Sam 1967); while ‘Labrador Tea’, L. groenlandicum Oeder of the Kwakiutl Indians is said to have narcotic properties (Turner and Bell 1973), pointing to possible content of ericolin and grayanotoxins.

An ‘epidemic’ of honey poisoning in New Zealand was traced to honeydew or excrement of Scolypopa australis Walker, which had fed on leaves of tutu, Coriaria arborea Lindsay, Coriariaceae (Palmer-Jones 1947; Palmer-Jones 1965; Palmer-Jones and White 1949). ‘Mellitoxin’ isolated from the honey was identical to hyaenanchin from euphorbiaceous Hyœnanche globosa Lamb; and a second honey toxin, tutin, is found in C arborea (Clinch and Turner 1968; Palmer-Jones 1965). This leaf-hopper had transformed tutin from tutu leaves into hyænanchin during digestion; the bees making honey from its excrement. Symptoms of this honey poisoning included giddiness, delirium, excitement, suggesting a toxicological relationship to the Ecuadorian shamanic inebriant C.thymifolia Humb. Et Bonpl.ex Willd., shanshi, used to induce sensations of flight (Naranjo 1969). Preliminary investigations of shanshi suggested presence of a toxic glucoside (Naranjo and Naranjo 1961).

Solanaceæ are known both for shamanic inebriants and toxic honeys. Human honey poisonings in Hungary were traced to Atropa Belladonna L. or Datura metel L., and symptoms resembled those of tropane alkaloids scopolomine and hyoscyamine found in both (Hazslinszky 1956). Polish honey poisonings were traced to D. inoxia Miller (=D.meteloides DC.ex Dunal ), and scopolomine found in the honey (Lutomski, Debska and Gorecka 1972). Both scopolomine and atropine were detected in toxic honey from Colombia, of unknown provenience (Barragan de Dominguez 1973). Perhaps Brugmansia species were involved – these Andean shamanic inebriants (Ott 1993) yield toxic honeys (Lockwood 1979). Indole alkaloid gelsemine could account for honey poisoning from loganiaceous Gelsemium sempervirens (L.) Aiton in 19th century South Carolina – symptoms also included giddiness (Kebler 1896).

Brasilian inebriating honey from stingless bee Trigona recurva Smith is called feiticeira (‘sorceress’) or vamo-nos-embora (‘let’s go!’) in “allusion to the reeling, half drunken condition in which one falls after partaking of this honey” (Ihering 1903(4)). Mombuca, Argentine stingless bee (Melipona sp.) honey had “inebriating effects owing to the fact that the little bees harvest it from some flowers with narcotic properties” (Spegazzini 1909). Toxic honeys oreceroch and overecepes occur in Chiquitos, Bolivia; also a delicious honey, omocayoch, said to be as inebriating as liquor (D’Orbigny 1839); while a Paraguayan honey was characterized “as intoxicating as aqua vita” (Schwarz 1948).

So at least three categories of psychoactive phytotoxins-indole and tropane alkaloids and glucosides-occur in toxic honeys, and likewise in nectars from which such are made (Vide: reviews of non-sugar floral-nectar chemistry: Baker 1977; Baker and Baker 1983). Psychoactive cannabinoids occur in bee pollen of marijuana, cannibinaceous Cannabis Sativa L. ( Paris, Boucher and Cosson 1975). Pollen toxins could be sequestered by bees in honeys, as are nectar or honeydew toxins. Cannabis nectar likely also contains cannibinoids, explaining a common belief of marijuana growers, that marijuana honeys are psychotropic.

One of the more recondite Mesoamerican inebriants is the Mayan metheglin balché, a mead of stingless-bee honey, water and bark of leguminous balché, Lonchocarpus violaceus (Jaquin) DC. (Goncalves de Lima, et al. 1977). L. violaceus is psychoactive, owing to content of longistylines (Delle Monache, et al. 1977) or piscicidal rotenone, and Mayaist C. Ratsch proposed other shamanic inebriants, like psilocybin musrooms and ololiuhqui (Turbina corymbosa (L.) Rafinesque. Xtabentún in Mayan) were once added to balché (Ratsch 1992). Ratsch thought feasible my suggestion that xtabentun may have been a balché ingredient, as honey rich in psychotropics ergoline alkaloids of this Convolvulaceæ (Hofmann 1963) – noting that the Lacandon Indians, avid balché consumers know of inebriating honeys. Contemporary shamanic use of T. corymbosa has not been documented among the Mayans, but is all but universal among indigenous groups in Oaxaca, and occurs elsewhere in Mexico (Lipp 1991; Wasson 1963). Besides psychoactivity, ergolines have potent uterotonic effects, and seeds of ololiuhqui/ Xtabentún are also used as ecbolics/oxytocics (to precipitate childbirth) by indigenous groups in Oaxaca (Browner 1985; Ortiz de Montellano and Browner 1985). ‘Virgin honey’ of stingless bees (Trigona sp.) is used in ethnogynecology, noting of Tabentun (Xtabentún, identified as convolvulaceous):”the aromatic honey from its flower is said to be the source of a potent drink” (Roys 1931). Oaxacan Mixe use T.Corymbosa as a shamanic inebriant, and also employ “special honey” from Trigona sp. As an ethnogynacological remedy (Lipp 1991). Clavigero highly praised estabentun honey (Clavigero 1780); entomologist H.F Schwarz attributed xtabentún honey to Melipona beecheii Bennett, noting it was still produced in Yucutan in the 1940′s, being the most esteemed of many ethnomedicinal Mexican honeys (Schwarz 1948). An article on Mayan apiculture described situating hives near natural strands of xtabentún, noting “all their honey comes from this flower. No other is allowed to prosper in the immediate vicinity” (Mediz Bolio 1974). These clues suggest colecab (M.beecheii). T.corymbosa honeys were produced intentionally and much esteemed for constituent ergoline alkaloids conferring uterotonic and psychoactive properties. Such honeys may have been exploited by the Mayans in fabrication of their ritual metheglin balché, endowing the sacred inebriant with the plants legendary and chemically-verified entheogenic properties.

Field work in Yucutan and Quintana Roo revealed xtabentún honey was no longer of economic importance, and traditional Mayan hollow-log apiculture was found sadly degenerated. We failed to obtain samples of xtabentún honey for bioassay and chemical analysis, but attempts to produce it are underway. In Merida and Vallodolid, Yucutan, there survives production of a distilled liqueur from fermented honey, and known as xtabentún! A modern liqueur named for a pre-colombia entheogen, is yet another clue pointing to existence of inebriating T. corymbosa honey, and its probable use as traditional fermentation substrate for the sacred Mayan metheglin balché.

Xtabentún liqueur and conjectured use of psychoactive honey in balché have parallels in the classical and modern worlds. Pliny noted meli mænomenon of Asia Minor was made into a mead or metheglin, and toxic Ericaceæ honey was traditionally added to alcholic beverages in the Caucasus, to enhance their inebriating properties; while such toxic honey, deli bal, is taken in Turkey as a tonic in milk. Deli bal was an important export from this region in the 18th century, widely used to potentiate liquors in Europe – called miel fou, ‘crazy honey’ in France (Mayor 1995). “very intoxicating” honey, likely from spp. (mountain laurel) was used in 18th century New Jersey to ‘spike’ liquor sold under the appropriate trade name ‘Metheglin’ (Jomes 1947;Kebler 1896)

Toxic honeys are not unusual (I have intentionally ignored the literature on non-psychoactive plant (and industrial) toxins sequestered in honeys), nor are accidental inebriations by psychoactive honeys exceptional. In satisfying the universal human “sweet tooth” during human explorations of any given ecosystems, foragers would encounter psychoactive and other toxic honeys. Having consumed such honeys and experienced psychoactive or other medicinal properties of their contained alkaloids and allied phytochemicals, it would require no special technology nor great imagination to follow the bees to the nectar source, thereby easily finding valuable plants. It has been suggested that ethnomedicinal and culinary plants were discovered by a systematic process of ingesting all species, in the eternal search for food. Some have questioned whether such an extensive bioassay program were feasible in areas of extraordinarily high biodiversity, such as Amazonia, thought to be home to at least 80 000 species of higher plants (Schultes 1988)! Apart from observation of the effects of bioactive plants on domestic wild animals, serendipitous encounters with phytotoxins in honeys could have served as highly specific and efficient pointers to medicinal, especially psychoactive, plants, which would thus stand out in deep relief, even against a backdrop of extreme biodiversity.

There is evidence that in the case of T.corymbosa among the Yucatecan Mayans, a toxic honey may have attained exalted status as a preferred method of ingesting a psychoactive plant, even being produced intentionally. These Mayans came to worship bee-gods like Ah-Muzen-Cab,’Great Lord Bee’, who can be seen descending even today above the entrances to pyramid-top temples at Tulúm and Coba, his ancestral home. Much as we sweeten our bitter medicines with sugary syrups, bees collecting toxic nectars from flowers might naturally have prepared and concentrated a sweetened drug for the delectation of awed human votaries of Ah-Muzen-Cab and his industrious, heavenly host.

__________

Lyrics/Poetry: Robin Williamson

Strings in the earth and the air

make music sweet

strings by the river

where the willows meet

there’s music along the river

for love wanders there

pale flowers on his mantle

dark leaves on his hair

all softly straying

with head to the music bent

and fingers playing

upon an instrument

twilight turns from amethyst

to deep and deeper blue

lamps light with a pale green glow

the trees of the avenue

the old piano plays an air

sedate and slow and gay

she bends upon the yellow keys

her head inclines this way

shy thoughts and grave wide eyes

and hands that wander as they list

twilight turns a darker blue

with lights of amethyst.

—-

The Dancing of the Lord of Weir

In the third part of the year

when men begin to gather fuel against the

coming cold

hear hoover ring hard on frosty ground

begins our song

for centuries we lived alone high on the moors

herding the deer for milk and cheese for leather

and horn

humans came seldom nigh

for we with our spells held them at bay

and they with gifts of wine and grain did

honour us

returning at evening from the great mountains

out red hoods ring with bells lightly we run

until before our own green hill

there we did stand

she is stolen

she is snatched away

through watery meads straying our lovely

daughter

she of the wild eyes

she of the wild hair

snatched up to the saddle of the lord of Weir

who has his castle high upon a crag

a league away

upon the horse of air at once we rode

to where Weir’s castle lifts like a crippled claw

into the moon

and taking form of minstrels brightly clad

we paced upon white ponies to the gate

and rang thereon

“we come to sing unto my lord of Weir

a merry song.”

into his sorry hall we stepped

where was our daughter bound near his chair

“come play a measure!”

“sir at once we will!”

and we began to sing and play

to lightly dance in rings and faster turn

no man within that hall could keep his seat

but needs must dance and leap

against his will

this was the way we danced them to the door

and sent them on their way into the world

where they will leap amain

till they think one kind thought

for all I know they may be dancing still

while we returned with our own

into our hall

and entering in

made fast

the grassy door.

—-

The Water Song

Water, water

See the water flow

Glancing, dancing

See the water flow

Wizard of changes

Teach me the lesson of flowing

Dark and silvery

Mother of life

Water. water

Holy mystery

Heavens daughter

Wizard of changes

Teach me the lesson of flowing

God made a song

When the world was new

Waters laughter

Sings it through

Wizard of changes

Water. water, water

—-

Queen of Love

A strong power calls from the left hand

Across the waters deep

a strong power calls from the left hand

let all things sleep or weep

oh the queen of love, you have unwove my eyes

and my heart will not sleep

the eye would sleep but the mind would rise

I must needs walk down God’s eyebrows

and along the street of his eyes

look for me and you will see me in my red cloak

swimming determined

as God’s blood flows

creatures of grief you beg from the thief

I will not carry home your sacks of sorrow

but I will pay the fiddler good silver if he smiles

pray God he see tomorrow

and the fine fine girls that are into it

and my eyes with salt water swim

and we disputing with a brittle gaiety

upon the world’s rim

if I sought to love you with my body

it would be with a bent back

unto the day of doom

Oh the Queen of Love

I am in her heart

she is in my room

and together alone we clasp hands

and in each other’s eyes walk the endless shore

and below I have my duty to perform in the song

and that that I was

you will see it no more

the snow is on the hills of my heart

and to speak is to die

the men at arms do seek to mark me

and the monks raise hue and cry

seek me in vain on Golgotha

or in fear’s hollow

for the way I take today

only the true may follow

the ancestors in stone armour

calling for loyalty untrue

seek to make a zigzag of the arrow’s flight

it is so swaddled in the bands of form

but I am girdled with the storm

and cloaked with the night

I am not to be seen or found

save only in what I cause

standing outside on the inside outside

perfectingness and flaws

how will I say where I end

or where you begin

how will I say, what shall I play

shall it be you or the wild wind

as Pan with the unsane eyes

or with the wild horns

or when I am crowned with the paper crown

or with the crown of thorns

a strong power compels distortion from the right hand

fleece to the grey wolves

fangs to the grey sheep

but the Queen of Love she strokes

my body alive, that I do not sleep.

The doctor brews potions and pills

to open his own front door

and the locksmith makes strong bolts

to bar his gates to every new breeze that blows

shall I now put lion’s ears upon my ears

hear every sound as a roar

shall I now put mouse’s eyes upon my eyes

gauge the moon for size against my paw

while the Queen of Love

she sings to me

from above and beyond the world

and I observe my mind

it is playing ignorant boy

while at her feet I am curled

and I remember all female movements so well

of such a form to bring much joy and ease much care

to perfume and let fall the coloured gown

and to let down the curling hair.

But now I play seed thrower

and I will play three-legged man

I will play dream weaver and day bringer

and catch as catch can

While the Queen of Love

she swims like a silver dove in my mind’s room

and my body sleepwalks down the road

in a warm dark swoon…

—-

A Blessing on your day!

Nice evening… I sat at the table with family and friends, ranging in age from 92 to 15 years. Diverse backgrounds, Russian Ex-pats, English, Scots, Americans.. A lively conversation, good food, excellent wine and the night unwinding around us in a beautiful breeze.

Various images arise: Rowan cooking aubergine over the charcoal grill under the bamboo with Sofie looking on, Tony wandering the garden enquiring about the plants, Irina looking lovely, Mary smiling, tired from all the preparation… Maggie with her Mother Ruth and her nephew John (a truly wonderful 15 year old from Pendelton), Zena laughing, asking her daughter Irina what everyone is saying in English… Andre crusing through as he always does with his impish smile.

Nothing like being with good friends and family! A great night.

—

The entry for today is based on Invocation… I found a series of poems, meditations and thought they would cap the week nicely. It is funny I feel the sacred in the strangest ways. Sometimes it strikes me at what would be considered awkward… 80) Nothing like having an epiphany whilst shopping at Home Depot in the morning, staring off into space at a display and seeing the patterns of chaos congeal into a coherent concept. This was not the way the corporation hoped you would spend your time on their territory.

I find the mind going over a concept, a poem, or a lyric and finding a gem of incredible worth staring back at me; often times I will have heard or read it for years, and missed the point. Here is to finding the point, and all the multiple facets of the situation!

These Poems/Invocations help bring me back to the root of things as I have come to know it. Your speed may vary of course…. 8o)

I hope this finds you well,

Gwyllm

——

The Last Request:

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On the Menu

The Links

The Quotes

4 Poems of Invocation…

_________

The Links

Greek archaeological sites celebrate Lunar festival

Goat crowned King of Ireland at ancient fair

A Closer Look: On justice and the sacred

_________

The Quotes

“On my income tax 1040 it says ‘Check this box if you are blind.’ I wanted to put a check mark about three inches away.”

“Television is a new medium. It’s called a medium because nothing is well-done.”

“We need anything politically important rationed out like Pez: small, sweet, and coming out of a funny, plastic head.”

“Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

“There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.”

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

_________

The Invitation

It doesn’t matter what you do for a living or how much money you have,

what matters is how you live, how much you give of yourself.

It doesn’t matter where you were born or with whom you studied,

It matters only when you give birth to yourself, and then share that wealth.

I do not care what planets square your moon,

or how much joy you express when times are good

and all the world seems to smile upon you,

I care only that when fortune betrays you, and you stand naked

abandoned at night near the edge of the lake–

you can still lift up your arms to the great silver of the moon and shout, “Yes!”

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or how many things you possess,

it matters only that you can be content when alone in the silent spaces,

and then wake each morning confident to do what needs to be done for the children.

[Remembered from the words of a Mountain Elder]

—-

Hymn to Dionysos

Blessed, blessed are the ones who know the mysteries of the god.

Blessed, blessed are those who hollow their lives in the worship of god,

whom the spirit of the god possesseth,

and who belong to the holy body of the god.

Blessed, blessed are the dancers and those who are purified,

who dance on the hill in the holy dance of god.

Blessed are they who keep the rite of Cybele the Mother.

Blessed are the disciples who become prophets, the Gnostics

who hold the holy wand of god.

Blessed are those who wear the ivy crown of the Conquering One–

Blessed, blessed are they,

Dionysos is our god!

–Adapted from the Bacchae

Euripides [480-406 B.C.E.]

—-

INVOKATION TO CERES

O great and Holy Goddess,

I pray Thee by thy

plenteous and liberal right hand,

by the joyful ceremonies of thy harvest,

by the secrets of thy Sacrifice, by the flying

chariots of thy dragons, by the sowing of the ground gnosis

thou hast invented on earth for thy children;

by the marriage of Persephone, by the diligent wisdom and

devotion of thy blessed daughter; and by the other secrets and

devotions thou hast revealed to thy mortal followers,

whose hands till the earth in love for Thee.

Come to us here in this

consecrated place,

Deign to bless these rites

with thy shinning face,

Bless thy faithful Children

with thy Holy Grace.

O beautiful Ceres and Great Mother Isis are One!

Grant us thy fruitful protection!

—

The Golden Thread of Time

Chaos rules the world of Man and Nature

in the moment of now

Order will return for a while in the cycle of the times,

but the World will never die,

The Vine of Man and Woman may wither and pass away.

New Birth will come and Ma-at return.

New eyes may greet the rising of the Sun

In distant future, another kind may taste the living air of ancient dead

and rise in life from the dust of ages,

To wonder once again at the stars

and keep the Time to sail the seas on wind and tide.

They who are to walk the earth

will spin beneath the ruthless eye of Starry Serpent

and watch the hoary Twelve sail by with Orion

at the helm

And will they see the Sun give life by day?

As did we,

and live in balance with the world

For a while.

What clothes will you wear, my love?

And how shall I recognise thee?

Will we be as One as once before?

When we meet again in this ship of life.

in distant times,

On the Golden Thread of millions of years.

©2001 Crichton E M Miller

—-

Priests

And who will write love songs for you

When I am lowered at last?

And your body is that little highway shrine

That all my priests have passed.

My priests they will put flowers there

They will kneel before the glass

But they’ll wear away your little window love

They will trample on the grass.

And who will aim the arrow

That man will follow thru your grace?

When I am lowered of memories

And all your armor has turned to lace.

The simple life of heroes

The twisted life of saints

They just confuse the sunny calendar

With their red & golden paint.

And all of you have seen the dance

That God has kept from me

But he has seen me watching you

When all your minds were free.

And who will write love songs for you

When I am lowered at last?

And your body is some highway shrine

That all my priests have passed.

My priests they will put flowers there

They will stand before the glass

But they’ll wear away your little window light

They will trample on the grass.

Leonard Cohen

—-

(“Windmill of the Time” Michael Cheval)

Thursday is here… working all over town. We have a party of friends tonight, Irina and her mother Zena from Russia along with Irina’s son Andre, Maggie & Tony with 3 relatives along as well. Should be fun, and as it is the coolest temps I have seen in Oregon in August, a pleasant night as well…

Out of here until later, more coming down the pike….

Gwyllm

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On The Menu

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The Paisley Gate: Tantric Psychedelia -Erik Davis

Poetry: XUE TAO

Art: Michael Cheval

_________

The Links:

Strange holes in the ground discovered in Krasnoyarsk region

Escaped golf-course grass frees gene genie in the US

Volcanic eruptions score melodies

Contrail and Shadow Above Glasgow

_________

(“Metamorphosis” Michael Cheval)

__________

The Paisley Gate: Tantric Psychedelia

by Erik Davis

This piece appears in Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books, 2002)

I first visited Green Gulch Farms on a sunny Sunday in the fall of 1995. A group of students were sitting beneath the alien rows of eucalyptus trees, talking casually with Tenshin Reb Anderson, then abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Jerry Garcia had recently died, and at one point in the conversation, a blond, fortysomething woman asked Anderson, in all seriousness, whether Garcia was a bodhisattva.

Myself I would have failed this particular Marin County koan. But not Anderson, who answered the question promptly and without condescension. He first described the Buddhist idea of protectors: beings who can be said to encircle and guard the dharma without being entirely within the fold. Presumably, Anderson was taking inspiration from the dharmapalas of Tibetan Buddhism, especially the lokapalas: ferocious local spirits who swore allegiance to the Buddha-way only after being magically subjugated by the tantric missionary and wizard Padmasambhava. Some of these shamanic entities are even said to not fully accept the Buddha’s teaching; though integrated within Tibetan Buddhism, they retain an intense liminality, or “in-betweenness”. And as the recent controversy over the protector spirit Dorje Shugden makes clear, one monk’s manifestation of Manjushri can be another monk’s blood-thirsty demon.

In any case, Anderson’s response was brilliant. Without castigating whatever visionary and communal ecstasy Deadheads managed to extract from their loopy scene, Anderson established an open border between Garcia and the dharma, at once separating the two while acknowledging their connection — a connection which, in the Bay Area anyway, is as local as a lokopala. But though American Zen and the Grateful Dead have both served as major attractions in northern California’s spiritual carnival, the abbot also needed to draw the line. On the far side of this line lay drugs, because drugs, Anderson made clear, were definitely not the Buddha way.

Anderson did not name the drugs, which was just as well, as the day was growing short and the Dead’s curriculum vitae is long. Garcia’s appetite for heroin and freebase was at times prodigious, and few would make an argument for the enlightening nature of these substances. But in the larger context of the Grateful Dead experience, “drugs” means psychedelics — the LSD, mescaline, peyote, mushrooms, and other compounds that transformed the Dead’s cowboy jazz into the occasion for Dionysian romps in the electric bardo. In Anderson’s analogy, then, psychedelics correspond to the unassimilable shamanic elements of Tibetan folk magic, to those pre-Buddhist beliefs and practices, Bon-po or not, that remain outside the circle of dharma they nonetheless helped shape.

Leaving the Grateful Dead aside, I’d like to suggest that the overlap between American psychedelic culture and American Buddhism is roughly analogous to the liminal zone inhabited by the less sublime dharmapalas. The analogy works both historically and, if you will, institutionally. On top of providing an imaginative slant on the significant historical links between American Buddhism and psychedelics in the 1960s and 70s, the tantric tension between local demons and dharma protectors also helps us understand how some contemporary American Buddhists grapple with the controversial, even heretical specter of psychedelic spirituality. When Tibetan Buddhists engaged the fierce and sorcerous entities of the pre-Buddhist mindscape, they faced the same sort of problem that greets American Buddhists attempting to account for the convulsively magic molecules in their midst: how to simultaneously honor and vanquish, integrate and control.

The grizzled bearded visage of “Mahajerry” tells us something right off the bat: the question of psychedelics and American Buddhism remains intimately bound up with the collective spiritual narrative of one particular generation of Americans. Though American Buddhism sprouted from seeds planted long before the emergence of “the 60s”, the dharma rode to relative prominence on the same countercultural wave of mind-expansion that thrust Timothy Leary into the limelight. Indeed, if there had been no Pranksters, no acid tests, no “instant nirvana,” it is hard to imagine that places like Green Gulch would exist at all. Buddhism in American first hit its stride in the context of countercultural spirituality, and it is simply impossible to understand countercultural spirituality without taking psychedelics into account. Indeed, such understanding is probably impossible without taking psychedelics, period.

The legitimacy of psychedelic spirituality is a vexed question, especially given the ideas of authenticity and illusion that play such a pivotal role in the spiritual assessment of drugs. Anthropologically speaking, though, its hard not to see the question of legitimacy as anything other than a mechanism of cultural power through which religious institutions and lineages define and police their borders. (In this sense, religious discourse surrounding drugs is similar to those surrounding food and sex.) As we now know, psychedelic substances, not to mention other psychoactive drugs, have played a profound role in the history of the human spirit. We may never know what materials composed the soma praised in the Vedas or the punch that gave the Eleusinian Mysteries their mystical zap, but its a pretty safe bet that something more than watery oatmeal was being quaffed. Psychoactive plants are even more fundamentally linked to those ancient indigenous practices we rather loosely describe as “shamanism.” The religious culture of pre-Buddhist Tibet, for example, was part of a huge shamanic complex that stretched throughout Eurasia and included, in its more northern stretches at least, the ritual use of the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria.

In any case, psychoactive drugs must be featured prominently in any catalog of what Mircea Eliade called humanity’s “technologies of ecstasy” — a tool-kit of altered states production that includes dancing, drumming, fasting, fucking, and physical ordeal. But in the 1960s, in a culture that has swept its mystical and ecstatic traditions under the moldering carpet of mainline Christianity, there was little to no context for the experiences such technologies helped produce. While one can certainly explore psychedelic space as a “modernist”, looking to art and science for models, many people found that only mystical language and occult images could frame their chemical illuminations. Many Westerners turned, in particular, to Eastern religion, partly because the Orient has long been an imaginal zone where Westerners scamper to when they want to escape the prison of scientific materialism. The “Eastern turn” also makes phenomenological sense. LSD could send serpentine energy shooting up your spine, or thrust you into apocalyptic mandalas, or vibrate the world into an energetic void. At the same time, drugs could also unveil the simple, immanent “Zen” of the ordinary world: a leaf, a breeze, or, as in Huxley’s famous mescaline tale in Doors of Perception, a fold in one’s trousers.

Drugs and dharma were themselves only a few of the ingredients in a heretical countercultural stew that included marijuana, free love, Tarot cards, street protests, long hair, anarchism, the I Ching, electric guitars, an active press, Carlos Castaneda, and Hindu iconography. From the perspective of serious Western Buddhists with Eastern teachers, not to mention the roshis and lamas who themselves arrived in the 1960s and 70s in order to found institutions, the freak scene must have seemed, in its eclectic mania, almost as wild and fierce as Tibet seemed to the Indian missionaries of the 8th century. In a sense, the counterculture was America’s own fractured shamanism, seething with untamed energies and magical phantasms. By taking root within this intensely vibrant culture, the Western dharma was able to make the transition from a marginal pursuit of intellectuals and cultural mavericks to the influential if constrained mass phenomenon it is today. While those roots may have been intoxicant-free, the soil they found was psychedelic, and its peculiar nutrients fundamentally shaped the blooms to come.

For one thing, Buddhism owed many of its recruits to the widespread fascination with altered states of consciousness — a fascination that was largely sparked, if not fueled, by drugs. Simply put, psychedelics gave people a taste for the excitement, power, anxiety, insight, and joy of altered states of consciousness. On an even more basic level, drugs also encouraged people to explore their own immediate experience, and to recognize that heaven and hell were functions of their own minds. Many Westerners were drawn to Buddhism because it too offered a “hands on” dimension lacking in Christianity, one that also loosely accorded with the modern “scientific” temperament that drugs, in their own way, subtly reinforced. This democratic turn towards direct experience became one of the hallmarks of countercultural spirituality, just as it became a hallmark of American Buddhism. The notion that samadhi was available to all, that everyone possessed something like the Buddha-mind, was emphasized by the universal action of the Sandoz molecule. “Have you ever been experienced?” Hendrix asked. If not, why not?

Once blown, many Western minds were far more likely to put up with alien rituals and grueling disciplines that promised even deeper and subtler experiences. The notion of practice — perhaps the richest and most multivalent term in American Buddhism — is crucial here. One basic meaning of practice is technique: one does not believe, one acts (or, perhaps more accurately, “action happens”). In other words, one adopts a technique, an internalized technology or a psycho-behavioral recipe, and explores the results. Though the act of swallowing a sugar cube is a pretty rinky-dink operation compared to the rigor and depth of zazen or hatha yoga, psychedelics did teach people that altered states, even refined ones, could be accessed through technologies of perception.

Indeed, LSD was only one device in the counterculture’s ever-expanding occult tool kit, which included divination systems like tarot cards and the I Ching, biofeedback devices and floatation tanks, as well as a variety of internal and physical disciplines: breathwork, t’ai chi, massage, pranayama, veganism, Kriya yoga. Given the unprecedented technological experience of the baby boom generation, it’s not surprising that they developed the conviction that technique, in some form, was integral to the process of transformation and insight. Whether the technology was external or internal was less important — was an acid test, with its feedback systems, light shows, and communal chemistry, inside or out? LSD helped insure that the Eliadean metaphor of spiritual practices as “inner technologies” would find its way into the lexicon of countercultural spirituality, so much so that it appears in the writings of a serious Buddhist scholar like Robert Thurman.

The problem with the metaphor of technology is that technologies generally encourage a dualistic viewpoint, while mature practice erodes the perception that there is a doer using a tool to pursue a goal. This was an important lesson for American Buddhists during the freak years, when the goals were cosmic. In those idealistic times, there was a veritable obsession with the achievement of enlightenment experiences — an obsession that may have owed much of its ferocity to expectations first laid down by drugs. Over the decades, the emphasis has shifted away from such fierce pursuits, and many teachers go out of their way to deflate the excitement surrounding powerful meditation experiences. Indeed, I suspect that the hostility that some contemporary Buddhists express towards psychedelics conceals an anxiety that their practice remains tainted, on some level, with the desire to get high. But this is an understandable desire — it’s hard to say how many people would continue the practice over the years if they didn’t occasionally “get the goods,” whether on the pillow or on drugs.

But psychedelics don’t just get people high. Like literal acid, they work to empty, on both individual and social levels, the apparently solid substance of conventional reality — so-called common sense. Regardless of the otherworldly visions drugs can bestow, the deeper psychedelic message concerned the relativity of thought and perception — a “philosophical” insight that drugs reveal directly through the operation of your own nervous system. Unfortunately, as Nietzsche saw with a prophet’s eye, relativity is only a stone’s throw away from nihilism. Strong psychedelics gave people a glimpse of emptiness, but while the void could be glittering at its peak, it could feel like a bottomless pit the morning after. The ease with which so many psychedelic users sank into cynicism, mental instability, and addiction to more insidious drugs shows that psychedelics themselves do nothing to build the contexts of meaning and spiritual aspiration necessary to prevent such ecstatic technologies from becoming hollow and even destructive mechanisms. Some of the new religious movements of the 1970s — like the Jesus Freaks — reacted against the druggy void with a new fundamentalism. But the dharma — whose full-frontal embrace of sunyata is coupled with a compassionate rejection of nihilism — seemed unusually poised to answer the problems posed by a stark psychedelic confrontation with the ultimate relativity and provisional nature of all phenomenal experience.

So how do we express and characterize the relationship between psychedelics and dharma practice? The conventional answer, offered by many once-tripping Buddhists, is that drugs “open the door.” Without much work or knowledge on the part of the user, psychedelics can crack open consensus reality, expand identity beyond the confines of the conventional self, induce ego-death, and unveil the connection between mind and the totality of the real. However “inauthentic” these experiences may be judged to be, many people respond to them by turning to Eastern practice in order to extend, comprehend, and deepen their insights. Once their practice has stabilized and opened up, many of these people abandon drugs as needless or even harmful distractions. In this view, spiritual practice becomes something like the lift-off of Apollo 11. Drugs point you towards the moon of enlightenment, and somewhat violently thrust you away from the gravity of consensus reality. Having done so, they can then be abandoned like the early stages of a rocket. Or as Alan Watts quipped, “Once you get the message, hang up the phone.”

Here psychedelics, once again, play the role of a liminal technology. That is, like a doorway or a telephone, they stand in-betwixt and in-between, shuttling mind over a threshold. However, while the image of door-opener certainly jibes with many people’s life experiences, it also serves to cordon off and subtly undermine the full force of psychedelic experience — not to mention their ongoing potential for insight. In other words, once drugs become nothing but expendable tools, the experiences they help provide (with more than a little help from the mind) can be ignored without being wholeheartedly denied. In Zen terms, they can be dispensed with as nothing more than “makyo.”

But what happens when serious practitioners continue to follow what Dale Pendell calls “the poison path”? What happens when you open the door and don’t shut it tightly behind you? Here is where the real controversy begins. No-one’s logging any numbers, but I suspect that a healthy chunk of self-identified practicing American Buddhists keep at least occasional dates with the writhing, world-rending void lurking in the heart of psychedelic hyperspace. But I also suspect that, if asked to render judgment on such activities, most dharma teachers would deliver a fat thumbs down. Indeed, psychedelic spirituality may well be the only real heresy in American Buddhism (except for maybe voting Republican). Heresy, though, is a Western concept, the stuff of witch burnings and gnostic cults. And though serious psychedelic culture certainly has its gnostic aspects, in the context of American Buddhism, it is perhaps best described as a kind of tantra — a crude and scandalous one for sure, but homegrown at least, arising from our “native” tradition of countercultural craziness.

Given the generally cheesy spectacle of American neo-tantric sexology, I want to emphasize that I am not claiming that psychedelics have much of anything to do with authentic Asian tantra, an immensely rich and complex tradition about which I have only a scattering of book learning. Nonetheless, in the spirit of productive analogies rather than proclamations of metaphysical truth, I’d like to suggest a number of intriguing parallels. The most obvious one is secrecy. Despite their crucial role in the propagation of American Buddhism, psychedelics are basically not the stuff of dharma talks, or Shambhala books, or Tricycle articles. Discussions occur within the context of sangha and teacher-student relationships, but only selectively and probably not very often at all. One reason for this secrecy derives from another similarity: as with the panca-tattva practices of “left-handed” tantric adepts, who, among other things, ritually consume booze, fish, and meat, the materials of psychedelic Buddhism are socially unsanctioned — literally, “against the law.” In fact, the condemnation that surrounds psychedelics may actually lend them some of their esoteric power, just as the negative social mores surrounding meat, alcohol, and sexual congress in traditional India contribute a certain antinomian buzz to the feistier tantric practices.

The connection between psychedelics and tantra goes beyond social practices, into the heart of esoteric perception. This material is difficult to describe, but one could say for starters that psychedelics usher the bodymind into a magical, liminal zone that unfolds between the consensual sensory world and the worlds depicted in the different languages of dream, art, and high-octane metaphysics. Within this “bardo logic,” memories, ideas, and images multiply and pulse like hieroglyphic sigils, suggesting patterns of association and hidden resonances that voyagers often take — or mistake — for revelations. But the real object of revelation is the mind itself — not simply as a source of meaning, or linguistic categories, but as an organic machine of perception, a machine that can be tweaked. Simply put, psychedelics present the imagination, and by “imagination” I don’t simply mean the source of our hazy daydreams or visionary flights, but the synthetic power that Kant posited as the generally unconscious mechanism through which our basic conceptual faculties construct the world of space-time.

The status of the imagination in Buddhism is, to put it mildly, ambivalent. On the one hand, the imagination is often treated as a synonym for avidya — it is the imagination that mistakes the rope of reality for the frightening (or seductive) serpent. The very literary form of the earliest Buddhist texts — their dryness, repetition, and lack of flavor — argues that the desiccation of the imagination was a goal of practice. On the other hand, many Mahayana sutras are brimming with the materials of “fantasy”: galaxies of bodhisattvas, infinite garlands of wish-fulfilling gems, “clouds of spheres of light the color of the curl of hair between the Buddha’s eyebrows.” All this can seem very familiar. Indeed, I have not come across a canonical religious text that can approach the psychedelic majesty of the Avatamsaka Sutra, whose infinite details and ceaseless lists captures both the adamantine excess and fractal multiplicity of deep psychedelia.

The literary function of such apparently “imaginative” materials are of course debatable. Are they glimpses of sambhogakaya, seductive folk material, depictions of literal powers, allegories of wisdom? Whatever its function in sutra, however, the work of the esoteric imagination in tantra is central, even on the most literal level of visualization. For the generation stages of tantra, during which deities and their associated mandalas are constructed with the inner eye, the merely individual imagination is used a gateway, an engine to tame and train for the powerful perceptions of tantric reality. Through diligence, conduct, and ritual, the imagination itself is alchemically transformed, and the completion stages actualize, according to traditional accounts, what had only previously been imagined. Psychedelics are generally too chaotic and willful for this kind of controlled work; nonetheless, serious psychonauts will often encounter feelings, images, and pocket universes with an intensely tantric flavor. And why not? If one buys into tantric accounts of the subtle body, with its nadis and chakras and winds, then it is not too tough to imagine that, just as physical practices like hatha yoga, mantra, and tummo can stir up the energies of transformed perception, so might swarms of molecules swimming in the neural bath of the brain. Certainly it is the case that psychonauts who also practice yoga, tai chi, and visualization often find their work reshaping the phenomenology of their trips.

Of course, even if drugs trigger actual changes in the esoteric bodymind, they may be quite harmful, even demonic — a fear immortalized in the notorious claim that drugs somehow put “holes in your astral body.” As David Gordon White makes clear, however, medieval tantrics were not above ingesting alchemical elixirs, even as renegade sadhus ingest hashish and even jimson weed today. It is hard to imagine that if LSD, peyote, or DMT existed in ancient India, these substances would not have been used by at least some folks who conceived of their path as tantra. Despite the thoroughly integrated example of Vajrayana in Tibet, the religious temperament of tantra suggests that some of its practitioners will almost inevitably stray towards heterodoxy; its extreme wings will adapt extreme technologies, dangerous or not. Representatives of orthodoxy may argue that such activities represents degenerate tantra, and they may well be right. But technology is about nothing if it is not about speed, and tantra is the lightning path, appropriate for a time of waning Dharma. Perhaps psychedelics are the greased lightning appropriate for an even more degenerate West, when only the philosophy of a Malcolm X makes sense — by any means necessary.

One red herring in the psychedelic debate is the rejoinder that drugs are artificial and cannot provide “authentic” spiritual experiences. Leaving aside the reverse spiritual materialism of this argument (i.e., that there are some productions of mind that we can legitimately embrace as authentic spiritual experiences), there is the evident fact that psychedelics can produce something like spiritual or visionary experience. In other words, we can look at them as simulators. The use of the individual’s imagination in the generation stages of tantra, during which images, colors, and processes are constructed which only later become actualized, alerts us to the productive work that can be done by staging “run-throughs” of later, more profound experiences.

The most profound experience that lies ahead of most of us is death. Given the scandalous liberties I’ve already taken, I don’t want to draw too tight an analogy here, but the ultimate object of tantric simulation is the dying process: the loss of the elements, the experience of the clear light, and the bardo. Similarly, the most ferociously meaningful psychedelic experiences tend to be those in which something like dying seems to occur. These experiences can be so powerful that, even if some kernel of us knows that we are on drugs, they rip “us” down to the bones. (The nature of the witnessing consciousness that undergoes intense psychedelic experiences is one of the koans of drugs). Even if the trip itself does not resemble the actual dying process — and given the dizzying range of psychedelic experiences across both substances and minds, I suspect it doesn’t — it may be the closest most of us come to having the world snatched away and replaced with an exhilarating, terrifying, and blissful realm of deep cosmic mind. From this perspective, drugs can be seen as flight simulators for the Dharma; certain substances, including ketamine, ayahuasca and 5MEO-DMT, seem to lend themselves particularly well to this kind of work.

And it is work. Psychedelics can be as grueling, frightening, and anxious as any sesshin. Moreover, they offer any number of yawning traps for the spiritually inclined experimenter, and part of the kind and grizzled wisdom radiated by some longtime aficionados arises from avoiding those traps. One of these is to cling to the visions, to interpret the images or narratives or self-models that arise as being messages from some being or deeper plane of reality. Besides representing a literalizing of the imagination — the sin of idolatry, if you will — this grasping overlooks the site of much of the real work. The visions are not the point. The point is how “you” change in relationship to your experience, both inside it and out — phenomenologically, ethically, and aesthetically. There is no revelation but your own experience. And what is this experience? Submission to change, and the absolute truth of impermanence. After all, the altered states pass, obvious products of changing causes and conditions — in this case, eminently material ones.

Recognizing impermanence is a crucial lesson for any spiritual paths that involves altered states of consciousness, since the temptation to reify and cling to realizations, visions, and insights is so overwhelming. This temptation leads to “religion” in the bad sense of the term, and it is one that Buddhism, to its everlasting credit, goes out of its way to undermine. One of the lessons dealt by psychedelics, at least for mature aficionados, is that they disenchant the very exalted states they also introduce to the psyche . That is, not only do drugs show that such states can be generated by swallowing a pill or insufflating some noxious powder, but they invariably snatch those states away as they are metabolized and flushed from the body. They are always and evidently upaya, or “means.” In contrast, the material or contingent aspect of purely “spiritual” altered states of consciousness are not always so obvious, making the temptation to hold onto those states and experiences as revelations all the greater. Indeed, drugs may also have something to say to these apparently non-technological states of consciousness that play such a profound role in deep meditation, reminding us that they do arise from causes and conditions that are material as well as karmic. In fact, drugs may encourage us to sap the illusion of “essence” from all states of consciousness — not just this serotonin trance we take for ordinary reality, but for even the most legitimate mystical experiences. And yet the powerful phenomenology of drugs argues that we would be foolish to take these material causes as the only reality.

The dark side of drugs goes without saying (if only because it is said so much). One does not need to be a genius, or even a psychologist, to understand how easily drugs can amplify delusion, disassociation, and spiritual materialism, let alone feed into patterns of behavior and consumption that lead ever further away from the Dharma. Even if the real horrors are avoided, I suspect that anything more than occasional use of all but the most sacred medicines does not help much in the long run. From the perspective of an established meditation practice, drugs can come to seem quite crude, even absurd, their once awe-inspiring dynamics revealing ever more mechanical, repetitive and confusing effects. Nonetheless, at this point in the history of the spirit, spiritual practice and the psychedelic path are perhaps most fruitfully considered as distinct paths. Just as therapy is perhaps best seen as a complement of Dharma, sharing elements but also diverging somewhat in both goals and results, so might psychedelics be seen as a kind of shadow practice, with its own peaks and pitfalls — again, like the bon-po side of Tibetan Buddhism, always a little dodgy, a bit too earthy and coarse.

And it is for this reason that psychedelic Buddhism remains a marginal subject, buried beneath the far more established narrative of psychedelics as a door-opener. This narrative is simpler to accept, not only because it takes the heat of the present moment, but accords so well with the larger Buddhist boomer narrative, a narrative which still dominates the American Dharma.

You know the basic tale: the 60s were a crazy time of collective and individual experiments, including the copious consumption of mind-bending drugs. The fascination with altered states led some to the deeper rewards of Eastern practice, which many embraced with radical, even revolutionary intensity. But the 1970s and 80s brought various forms of disillusionment: cult-like scenes, sex and money scandals, and the erosion of naive expectations surrounding spiritual attainment. While continuing to refine their commitment to the Dharma, many practitioners embraced more conventional careers, married and spawned, and became increasingly integrated and identified with mainstream society. Meanwhile, previously uninterested, largely liberal boomers began to turn to pop Dharma as a path of healing rather than a means of probing the fringes of the mind. Today, as the gray hair thickens and bodies starts to creak, American Buddhism has become a rather conventional affair, especially when compared to the days of Trungpa, early Tassajara, and Be Here Now. The popular focus has shifted from the great doubt to the gentle heart, from fierce aspiration to everyday integration. Jack Kornfield says it all in the title of his recent book: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

There is nothing wrong with this story, reflecting as it does the genuine experience of a generation growing out of its unprecedented narcissism while simultaneously shaping a mass American vessel for the Dharma. But it inevitably marginalizes, if not denies, the crazy wisdom of psychedelia. In so doing, Buddhist boomers put themselves in a curious position, especially regarding generational transmission. Because even if psychedelic spirituality is a youthful folly, such folly may be necessary, at least for some Americans. Are we to suppose that the doors of perception are somehow easier for younger generations to open than they were for children of the 1950s? If so, why? In rejecting (or more frequently, ignoring) psychedelia, Buddhist boomers find themselves in a similar position to middle-aged ex-heads who pressure their children away from drugs, and justify their decision through the notion that “things were different then.”

I can say this as a being, born in the summer of love, whose teenage years were largely spent tuning into Southern California’s lingering freak vibes. For me, the I Ching, psychedelics, Dead shows, anarcho-leftism, and meditation (or “meditation”) were all part of one countercultural package of hedonic pop mysticism. Though I make no claims for the lasting value of my teenage experiments, they certainly set me up for a more “authentic” contact with the Dharma in the my mid-20s, when I was ready to take on the more sobering kit-and-kaboodle of vows, grueling retreats, and the four noble truths. In this way, psychedelic culture did serve to “protect” the Dharma for me, providing me with a host of superficial triggers that were only fired off later, when I encountered the “real deal.” For long before an American Gelugpa monk slipped me a copy of Tsongkhapa in India, a text which simply blew my mind, I had already seen the scary bodhisattva grin of Mahajerry beaming down from the stage, urging me to wake up and find out that I was the eyes of the world.

____________

Poetry: XUE TAO (768-831)

Sending Old Poems to Yuan Zhen

Everyone writes poems in their own manner

but only I know delicacy of wind and light,

and when writing of flowers in moonlight, lean towards the

dark.

Of a willow in rainy dawn I write how twigs hang down.

They say green jade should stay hidden deep,

but I write candidly on red-lined paper.

I’m old now but can’t stop writing

so I open myself to you as if I were a good man.

—-

A Spring in Autumn

Behind a ribbon of evening mist, a chill sky distills,

and a melody of far waterfalls like ten silk strings

comes to my pillow to tug my feelings,

keeping me awake in sorrow past midnight.

—-

Spring Gazing

1

Flowers bloom but we can’t share them.

Flowers fall and we can’t share our sadness.

If you need to find when I miss you most:

when the flowers bloom and when they fall.

2

I pull a blade of grass and tie a heart-shape knot

to send to the one who understands my music.

Spring sorrow is at the breaking point.

Again spring birds murmur sad songs.

3

Wind, flowers, and the day is aging.

No one knows when we’ll be together.

If I can’t tie my heart to my man’s,

it’s useless to keep tying heart-shaped knots.

4

Unbearable when flowers fill the branches,

when two people miss each other.

Tears streak my morning mirror like jade chopsticks.

Does the spring wind know that?

Willow Catkins

In February, light, fine willow catkins

play with people’s clothes in spring breeze;

they are heartless creatures,

flying south one moment, then north again.

—–

Hearing Cicadas

Washed clean by dew, cicada songs go far

and like windblown leaves piling up

each cicada’s cry blends into the next.

Yet each lives on its own branch.

—–

Moon

Its spirit leans like a thin hook

or opens round like a Han-loom fan,

slender shadow whose nature is to be full,

seen everywhere in the human world.

______

Xue Tao was well-respected as a poet during the Tang Dynasty, when she lived. She was born either in the Tang capital Zhangan or later on when her father, a minor government official, was posted to Chengdu in present-day Sichuan province. A story about her childhood, perhaps apocryphal, suggests that she was able to write complex poems by the age of seven or eight. She may have gained some literary education from her father, but he died before she had come to marriageable age and she ended up being a very successful courtesan (one of the few paths for women in Tang Dynasty China in which conversation and artistic talent were encouraged). After Wei Gao, the military governor, became her literary patron, her reputation was widespread. She seems to have had an affair with another famous literary figure, Yuan Zhen. Late in life she went to live in seclusion and put on the habit of a Taoist churchwoman. More than one hundred of her poems survive. She is often considered (with Yu Xuanji) to be one of the two finest female poets of the Tang Dynasty.

(“Wake up call in Wonderland” Michael Cheval)

People use the word “natural”…what is natural to me are these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.—Timothy Leary

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Here is the entry today, I am off to a clients so it is all brevity until later. Have a good one, and enjoy the beauty of the day.

Blessings,

Gwyllm

On the Menu

The Links

Using Psychedelics Wisely – Myron Stolaroff

Ancient Celtic Poetry

_________

The Links:

The Men in Black Ride Again

An Alien Abductee Shares Proof That We are Not Alone

Birth Pangs of a new Christian Zionism…

It could happen anywhere…

Hardly alien territory

________

Using Psychedelics Wisely

by Myron Stolaroff

A veteran researcher explains how psychedelics can be used to give beneficial results

GNOSIS, No. 26, Winter 1993

MY WIFE JEAN AND I had driven several miles up the mountain to an elevation of 6000 feet a few miles south of Mount Whitney in California. We were about to meet Franklin Merrell-Wolff, author of the book Pathways through to Space, an impressively articulate and detailed description of a person entering a state of enlightenment and savoring it over several months.

When we were ushered into his private office, we found ourselves before an outstanding personage who radiated a marvelous glow. When we had talked for a few minutes and I felt sufficiently at home, I spoke of our research work, telling him that we had spent three and a half years administering LSD, sometimes in conjunction with mescaline, to 350 research subjects and had published our findings in medical journals.

“My oh my!” he said, looking at us with consternation. “I hope you haven’t used these drugs yourselves.”

We admitted that we had. He continued, “According to X” (here he mentioned an Indian sage whose name I do not remember), “it will take you seven incarnations to recover from the damage of taking such substances!”

Naturally I was upset, but I didn’t think of the appropriate reply until we were driving back down the hill: “Never underestimate the grace of God!”

There is no question that psychedelic substances are remarkable graces. The farther one can reach into the vastness to be explored, the more one realizes how powerful these materials are. There seems to be no end to the levels of awareness that can be realized by those who use them to explore their psyches with integrity and courage.

The great value in these chemicals is that, in some way still not scientifically explained, they dissolve the boundaries to the unconscious mind. They give us access to our repressed and forgotten material, to the Shadow that C.G. Jung so effectively dealt with, to the archetypes of humanity, to an enormous range of levels of thought, and to the wellspring of creativity and mystical experience that Jung called the collective unconscious.

At the heart of the unconscious is what many experience as the source of life itself, and which some call God. Those who have experienced this describe it as a wondrous, ineffable source of light and energy that infuses all of creation, embracing all wisdom and radiating a vast, unending, and ever-constant love. Immersion in this is the essence of the mystical experience and produces what the great mystics have described as the state of unity or oneness. Such union is the culmination of all seeking, all desire; it is the most cherished of all experiences of which man is capable.

Not all who ingest these substances can count on such revelations. In fact, psychedelics are powerful agents and can be misused. It must be remembered that they help reveal the unconscious, and most of us have made its contents unconscious for very specific reasons. We may not welcome the appearance of repressed, painful feelings, or of evidence that our values and lifestyles might be considerably improved. Nor is it always easy to accept the spaciousness of our being, our immense potential, and the responsibility that these entail. We may also refuse to believe that we are entitled to so much beauty and joy without paying any price other than being ourselves!

To assure a rewarding outcome, let’s look at some factors that should be taken into consideration when using these materials. I must add here that in no way am I encouraging the use of illegal substances. I do hope, however, that greater understanding of these materials will help restore an intelligent policy that will make further research possible. Here are some things that will help ensure beneficial results:

SET AND SETTING

Set and setting have been widely recognized as the two most important factors in undertaking a psychedelic experience. Of these, set has the greatest influence.

As the drug opens the door to the unconscious, huge spectrums of possibilities of experience present themselves. Just how one steers through this vast maze depends mostly upon set. Set includes the contents of the personal unconscious, which is essentially the record of all one’s life experience. It also includes one’s walls of conditioning, which determine the freedom with which one can move through various vistas. Another important aspect of set consists of one’s values, attitudes, and aspirations. These will influence the direction of attention and determine how one will deal with the psychic material encountered.

In fact, one can learn a great deal by accepting and reconciling oneself with uncomfortable material. Resisting this discomfort, on the other hand, can greatly intensify the level of pain, leading to disturbing, unsatisfactory experiences, or even psychotic attempts at escape. This latter dynamic is largely responsible for the medical profession’s view of these materials as psychotomimetic. On the other hand, surrender, acceptance, gratitude, and appreciation can result in continual opening, expansion, and fulfillment.

Setting, or the environment in which the experience takes place, can also greatly influence the experience, since subjects are often very suggestible under psychedelics. Inspiring ritual, a beautiful natural setting, stimulating artwork, and interesting objects to examine can focus one’s attention on rewarding areas. Most important of all is an experienced, compassionate guide who is very familiar with the process. His mere presence establishes a stable energy field that helps the subject remain centered. The guide can be very helpful should the subject get stuck in uncomfortable places, and can ask intelligent questions that will help resolve difficulties, as well as suggesting fruitful directions of exploration that the subject might have otherwise overlooked. The user will also find that simply sharing what is happening with an understanding listener will produce greater clarity and comfort. Finally, a good companion knows that the best guide is one’s own inner being, which should not be interfered with unless help is genuinely needed and sought.

MOTIVATION

This is extremely important. Those who earnestly seek knowledge and deeply appreciate life in all its forms will do well. Yet certain characteristics of psychedelics make them very popular for recreational use. The most attractive of these is their great enhancement of sensual responses, which offer heightened perception, amplification of beauty and meaning, and intensified sensual gratification. Psychedelics can also generate a great sense of closeness among participants, especially in a group setting. While I am convinced that one of the great cosmic commands is “Enjoy,” there are traps in using these substances purely for recreation. The first is that a person seeking the delights of the senses may find himself overwhelmed by the eruption of repressed unconscious material without knowing how to deal with it. Another danger is that constant pleasure-seeking without giving anything back to life can distort the personality and ultimately produce more discomfort. The safe, sure way to rewarding outcomes with psychedelics is through intelligent, well-informed use.

HONESTY

For the serious spiritual seeker, or for that matter anyone seeking knowledge, the single most important characteristic is honesty. This means the courage to look at whatever is presented by the deep mind, the ability to admit one’s shortcomings when they become apparent, and the determination to change one’s behavior in line with the truth one has experienced.

ONGOING DISCIPLINE

Experts in the field now generally agree that it is wise to conduct psychedelic explorations within the framework of a spiritual discipline or growth program that will continually call attention to fundamental values and goals. A good discipline will outline a body of ethics for personal behavior that will support the changes required. Good ethics will also help us stay clear about our objectives, and will keep the door open to increasing depths of experience. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that the more we are prepared to pass on to others whatever spiritual largess we have accumulated, the more we will be given.

For myself, I found training in Tibetan Buddhist meditation a potent adjunct to psychedelic exploration. In learning to hold my mind empty, I became aware that other levels of reality would more readily manifest. It was only in absolute stillness, accompanied by a special, highly developed quality of listening, that many subtle but extremely valuable nuances of reality appeared. While I achieved this to some extent in ordinary practice, I found this effect to be greatly amplified while under the influence of a psychedelic substance. This in turn intensified my daily meditation practice.

PSYCHEDELICS AS WAY-SHOWERS

The role of psychedelics is often misunderstood. Many feel that having had wonderful experiences, they now have the answers and are somehow changed. And no doubt in many respects they are. But users often overlook the fact that there are usually heavy walls of conditioning and ignorance separating the surface mind from the core of our being. It is a blessing that psychedelics can set aside these barriers and give access to our real Self. But unless one is committed to the changes indicated, old habits of personality can rapidly reestablish themselves.

At this point many feel that repeating the experience will maintain the exalted state. It may, but most often real change requires hard work and dedicated effort. Unfortunately this is not always clear during the experience itself; it has merely pointed the way and shown what is possible. If we like what we see, it is now up to us to bring about the changes indicated.

There is a grace period following profound psychedelic experiences when changes can be rapidly made. At this time one is infused with the wonder and power of the new information. Moreover—and this is an area where some valuable research can be done—the drug experience releases a great deal of bodily and psychic armoring that is tied to our neuroses. This rejuvenation is quite noticeable after a good psychedelic experience, when, without the dragging weight of physical habit patterns, behavior can be more readily changed.

On the other hand, if you make no effort to change, old habits rapidly reassert themselves, and you find yourself sliding back into your previous state. In fact, it can be worse than before, because now you know that things can be better and are disappointed to find yourself mucking around in the same old garbage.

Another factor makes this process even more uncomfortable. A lot of the energy formerly tied up in repressed material is now released. This energy may be used quite fruitfully to expand the boundaries of your being to the new dimensions you have experienced. But if you return to old patterns of behavior, you now have more energy to reinforce them, making life more difficult. For this reason, these experiences must not be taken lightly, but with serious intent.

DEALlNG WITH THE SHADOW

As Jung indicated, the Shadow holds all the material that we have pushed aside so we can hide from ourselves. Unfortunately, it also contains much of our energy, and as long as it is unconscious, it exerts a powerful influence on our behavior without our knowing it. Furthermore, Shadow material is responsible for most of the difficulties humans create in the world. We project our Shadow onto others, believe those others to be the source of our difficulties, and seek refuge from them rather than taking responsibility in our own hands. Consequently we must resolve Shadow material if we are to develop. If this were accomplished on a widespread basis, it would be a major benefit for the world.

Jung describes human development as the process of “making the unconscious conscious.” Psychedelics, particularly in low doses, can be an extremely effective tool in this process. The bulk of my experience is with the phenethylamine compounds, which remained legal longer than the standard psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. Whereas a full dose of a phenethylamine like 2C-T-2 or 2C-T-7 might be 20 milligrams, a low dose would be ten or twelve milligrams, or roughly equivalent to 25-50 micrograms of LSD.

The most infallible guide to Shadow material is our uncomfortable feelings. Many do not like to use low doses because these feelings come to the surface. Rather than experience them, they use larger doses to transcend them. But these uncomfortable feelings are precisely what we must resolve to free ourselves from the Shadow, gain strength and energy, and function more comfortably and competently in the world. By using smaller amounts and being willing to focus our full attention on whatever feelings arise and breathe through them, we find that these feelings eventually dissolve, often with fresh insight and understanding of our personal dynamics. The release of such material permits an expansion of awareness and energy. If we work persistently to clear away repressed areas, we can enter the same sublime states that are available with larger doses—with an important additional gain. Having resolved our uncomfortable feelings, we are in a much better position to maintain a high state of clarity and functioning in day-to-day life.

I would also like to add a word about frequency: Individuals vary greatly in their frequency of use of these materials. Some are satisfied with an overwhelming experience which they feel is good for a lifetime. Others wish to renew their acquaintance with these areas once or twice a year. Still others are interested in frequent explorations to continually push their knowledge forward. Regardless of the frequency, it is wise to make sure that the previous experience has been well integrated before embarking on the next one. Early in one’s contact with these substances, where there is a wealth of new experience, this may take several months. As one becomes more experienced, the integration time grows shorter, and the interval between trials may be shortened.

Many stop the use of psychedelics when they feel they have learned what they wished. But often it is likely that they halt because they have hit a deeply repressed, painful area that is heavily defended. The issue goes beyond purely personal material, however. One is unlikely to reach full realization without awareness, not merely of one’s own pain and suffering, but of that of all mankind. This may help explain the Dark Night of the Soul, which is the final barrier to mystical union described by Evelyn Underhill in her classic book Mysticism. Since we are one, we must not only confront the personal Shadow, but the Shadow of all humanity. We can do this more readily when we discover the ample love that is available to dissolve all Shadow material.

FREElNG CONSTRlCTED AREAS

There is another way in which psychedelics can serve the serious seeker. It often happens that those pursuing rigorous spiritual disciplines achieve elevated states by pushing aside or walling off certain aspects of behavior. With honest use, psychedelics will not permit such areas to remain hidden, but will insist upon their surfacing. One then experiences the great relief of being in touch with all aspects of one’s being. The joy and thrill of being totally alive come from having complete access to all of one’s feelings.

THE TRAINED USER

There appears to be a cosmic law that says that giving our complete attention to an object, image, or idea with constancy, patience, and acceptance will allow its different attributes to unfold. Psychedelics greatly accelerate this process. To operate most effectively, the observer must have developed the ability to hold his mind steady so he can watch the process develop. Large doses can push one so hard that it is most difficult to do this. Therefore the best results are achieved by a “trained user”—a person who has learned to manage high doses of psychedelics, or who has learned to hold his mind steady enough to observe his inner process competently. As a user clears up his “inner stuff,” he gains more freedom in directing his experience. At this stage, higher doses can be profitably used to penetrate deeper into the nature of Reality.

Interestingly, this concept of the trained user does not appear in the literature. But it is precisely the trained user who can best take advantage of the unfathomed range of wisdom and understanding contained in the far reaches of the mind. There seems to be no limit to the dimensions of understanding that can be experienced by the explorer who has the courage, integrity, and skill to navigate them. With integrity, and with the support of appropriate disciplines and friends, one can bring back a great deal for the betterment of oneself and mankind.

Are psychedelics necessary? Can’t these same explorations be conducted by those who have mastered the skills of meditation? No doubt they can—with an enormous investment of time and effort. But it is unlikely that many Westerners will be willing to make such a commitment. For Western seekers, whose spiritual practice must usually be integrated with making a living, the proper use of psychedelics can considerably accelerate the process. However, it is not a path for everyone. Choice should be based on full knowledge of the factors involved.

Psychedelics are not a shortcut, as it is of little value to sidetrack important experiences. If enlightenment requires resolution of unconscious material (and my personal experience indicates that it does), those who aspire to such achievement must carefully consider the pace and intensity with which they are willing to encounter this vast range of dynamics. The psychedelic path, while much more intense than many other disciplines, is in a sense easier because it often provides an earlier and more profound contact with the numinous. Such contact inspires commitment and opens the door to more grace in surmounting uncomfortable material.

Myron with Albert, 2001

If our commitment is truly to the well-being and happiness of all sentient beings, then it is reasonable to study all useful tools for accomplishing these ends. Psychedelics, used with good motivation, skill, and integrity, can contribute much toward easing the pain and suffering of the world while giving access to wisdom and compassion for spiritual development.

The author has worked for many years in the field of psychedelic research. Between 1960 and 1970 he headed the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a research group conducting clinical studies with LSD and mescaline.

SUGGESTED READING

Adamson, S. Through the Gateway of the Heart. San Francisco: Four Trees Publications, 1985.

Blumenthal,Michael. “LSD at Mid-Life,” in New Age Journal, May/June 1992, pp. 81-83, 142-47.

Eisner, Bruce. Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. Berkeley, CA.: Ronin Publishing, 1989.

Grof, Stanislav. LSD Psychotherapy. Pomona, Calif.: Hunter House, 1980.

Ratsch, C., ed. Gateway to lnner Space. Bridport, Devonshire: Prism Press, 1989.

See especially the chapter “Purification, Death, and Rebirth” by Tom Pinkson. Shulgin, Ann and Alexander. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Berkeley, Calif.: Transform Press, 1991.

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. New York: E.P Dutton, 1961.

Weil, Andrew. The Natural Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

* Note: Subscriptions and backissues of Gnosis magazine can be purchased from:

gnosismagazine.com

___________

Ancient Celtic Poetry

My Hand is Weary with Writing…

-anon

My hand is weary with writing,

My sharp quill is not steady,

My slender-beaked pen jets forth

A black draught of shining dark-blue ink.

A stream of wisdom of blessèd God

Springs from my fair-brown shapely hand:

On the page it squirts its draught

Of ink of the green-skinned holly.

My little dripping pen travels

Across the plain of shining books,

Without ceasing for the wealth of the great―

Whence my hand is weary with writing.

—

On the Death of His Wife

– Muireadhach Albanach

I parted from my life last night,

A woman’s body sunk in clay:

The tender bosom that I loved

Wrapped in a sheet they took away.

The heavy blossom that had lit

The ancient boughs is tossed and blown;

Hers was the burden of delight

That long had weighed the old tree down.

And I am left alone tonight

And desolate is the world I see,

For lovely was that woman’s weight

That even last night had lain on me.

Weeping I look upon the place

Where she used to rest her head,

For yesterday her body’s length

Reposed upon you too, my bed.

Yesterday that smiling face

Upon one side of you was laid

That could match the hazel bloom

In its dark delicate sweet shade.

Maelva of the shadowy brows

Was the mead-cask at my side;

Fairest of all flowers that grow

Was the beauty that has died.

My body’s self deserts me now,

The half of me that was her own,

Since all I knew of brightness died

Half of me lingers, half is gone.

The face that was like hawthorn bloom

Was my right foot and my right side;

And my right hand and right eye

Were no more than hers who died.

Poor is the share of me that’s left

Since half of me died with my wife;

I shudder at the words I speak;

Dear God, that girl was half my life.

And our first look was her first love;

No man had fondled ere I came

The little breasts so small and firm

And the long body like a flame.

For twenty years we shared a home,

Our converse milder with each year;

Eleven children in its time

Did that tall stately body bear.

It was the King of hosts and roads

Who snatched her from me in her prime:

Little she wished to leave alone

The man she loved before her time.

Now King of churches and of bells,

Though never raised to pledge a lie

That woman’s hand – can it be true? –

No more beneath my head will lie.

—

A Child Born in Prison

– Godfraidh Fionn O’Dalaigh

A pregnant woman (sorrow’s sign)

once there was, in painful prison.

The God of Elements let her bear

in prison there a little child.

The little boy, when he was born,

grew up like any other child

(plain as we could see him there)

for a space of years, in prison.

That the woman was a prisoner

did not lower the baby’s spirits.

She minded him, though in prison,

like one without punishment or pain.

Nothing of the light of day

(O misery!) could they see

but the bright ridge of a field

through a hole someone had made.

Yet the loss was not the same

for the son as for the mother:

her fair face failed in form

while the baby gained in health.

The child, raised where he was,

grew better by his bondage,

not knowing in his fresh frail limbs

but prison was ground of Paradise.

He made little playful runs

while her spirits only deepened.

(Mark well, lest you regret,

these deeds of son and mother.)

He said one day, beholding

a tear on her lovely face:

‘I see the signs of sadness;

now let me hear the cause.’

‘No wonder that I mourn,

my foolish child,’ said she.

‘This cramped place is not our lot,

and suffering pain in prison.’

‘Is there another place’, he said,

‘lovelier than ours?

Is there a brighter light than this

that your grief grows so heavy?’

‘For I believe,’ the young child said,

‘mother, although you mourn,

we have our share of light.

Don’t waste your thoughts in sorrow.’

‘I do not wonder at what you say,

young son,’ the girl replied.

‘You think this is a hopeful place

because you have seen no other.

‘If you knew what I have seen

before this dismal place

you would be downcast also

in your nursery here, my soul.’

‘Since it is you know best, lady,’

the little child replied,

‘hide from me no longer

what more it was you had.’

‘A great outer world in glory

formerly was mine.

After that, beloved boy,

my fate is a darkened house.’

At home in all his hardships,

not knowing a happier state,

fresh-cheeked and bright, he did not grudge

the cold and desolate prison.

And so is the moral given:

the couple there in prison

are the people of this world,

imprisoned life their span.

Compared with joy in the Son of God

in His everlasting realm

an earthly mansion is only grief,

prisoners all the living.

Have a good one!

We are getting close to having the fund raising for the radio complete. If you feel the urge to join in with others supporting Radio Free EarthRites, please do!

Thanx- Gwyllm

Click on to Donate :

In a bit of a rush today… Rowan turns 16 today at 1:23. He has a most interesting chart, full of challenges for his Dad. 80) He just finished Mary Stewart’s “The Crystal Cave”, and has been tearing through all the Celtic Mythology and Reference books in our library. This summer has been a great one for him.

I am pleased to welcome Jay Kinney to our featured writers. His work with Gnosis Magazine (which he founded) and other projects over the years has helped me immensely in understanding the workings of the metaphysical universe. I still have a Roxy album (a bootleg copy of course!) that he did the cover on back in the early 1970′s. Hopefully we will be seeing more of his articles in the future. Welcome Jay!

On The Menu:

The Links

Islamic Dilemma and the Sufi Message – Jay Kinney

Poetry: William Blake

Art Work: John William Godward

Have a Brilliant Day!

Gwyllm

________

The Links

Cultivating cannabis? It’s like growing tomatoes, says judge

Evolution reversed in mice

After 40 years’ burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney is ordered to stop

Scared to Death

Jewish references erased in newly found Nazi Bible

________

Islamic Dilemma and the Sufi Message – Jay Kinney

Please Visit Jay Kinney’s Personal Web Site…

Please Visit Gnosis Magazine as well. Wonderful Site!

As the West comes to grips with the terrorist attacks and threats, there is a strong temptation to see things in simple terms of Good and Evil. But before we are stampeded into a “clash of civilisations,” we need to step back for a moment and examine the real forces at work. Islam is undergoing its own crisis, with many conflicting voices clamouring to be heard. The angry cries for Jihad threaten to drown out the saner counsel of Islam’s living mystics, the Sufis. What follows is one attempt to clear the air, in the hope that disaster might be averted.

Ironies abound. Amidst all the uproar it is easy to forget that in Arabic, “Islam” means “surrender,” and that it is derived from the same root word as “peace.” Those who are disposed to dismiss religion itself as an irrational scourge are happy to see this as just another case of religious hypocrisy. After all, if we add up all the casualties caused by holy wars, crusades, inquisitions, and other battles taken up in the name of God, the endless line of corpses would seem to give the lie to religious claims of a higher morality or compassion.

“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few,” Stendhal cynically observed. But, as Oscar Wilde noted: “Who is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” While religions have failed to live up to their own ideals, the same charge can be levelled against Democracy, Communism, Humanism, Monarchy, Science, and every other means of human self-organisation and inquiry. Of this we can be sure: no sooner will a model for social benefit be formulated than a dozen uses will be found to employ it for social ill. Social institutions – by their very nature – become arenas for the exercise of power and greed: the forces of the reptilian brain which take us back to Step One, over and over again.

Yet despite the abysmal record of folly and destruction, there is an enduring human need for a sense of spiritual connection to something greater than ourselves. Religions may be imperfect, but they have nevertheless provided a moral anchor for billions of people throughout history. Even if a believer’s faith be relatively unsophisticated and dependent on others’ say so, when sincerely held, it does offer some sense of connection with the Universe. This is no small thing, but it hardly exhausts the possibilities.

Fortunately, there is clear testimony that some individuals and groups have been able to fully realise the kernel of truth that too often lies slumbering within the religious husk. Anyone who has given sincere attention to the accounts and writings of genuine mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, Ibn ‘Arabi, or Plotinus, cannot fail to see that a higher consciousness, which encompasses both the Infinite Source of Being and the human individual, is possible.

This consciousness, as a direct and authentic experience, does not depend for its existence on theological or religious doctrine. Indeed, mystics say that this consciousness itself clarifies and illuminates doctrine.

Religions, as theological and social structures built around the realisations of their founders, must accommodate themselves to and address the traditions and customs of the cultures in which they evolve. Had Jesus been born in a Chinese manger or had Buddha been enlightened while sitting under Newton’s apple tree, the religions that followed in their wake would have been far different affairs. In order to better understand the current state of Islam, a brief look at its origin and evolution is in order.

There is no question that Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was a profound mystic whose lot it was to be born into a Bedouin tribal society shaped by intense family ties, trading routes, localised pagan gods, and relatively primitive cultural forms. The Qur’anic message, articulated by Muhammad in poetic Arabic, was received in discreet parts over the course of 22 years – years marked by attacks on the Prophet and his small band of followers by other hostile tribes.

Muhammad’s communion with the Real was called upon to provide guidance to the Muslims as they struggled to defend their faith amidst war and social chaos. As observed by some Qur’anic scholars, such as Fazlur Rahman, some passages of the Qur’an are addressed to a specific time and place, while others are of a more universal nature. This is important to note, as it accounts for some of the seeming contradictions between verses, as well as the problems that arise when verses are quoted out of context. But in any event, the Qur’an’s identity as a dialogue with the Supreme Being is so intertwined with the circumstances of its birth that, to this day, Muslims only consider a Qur’an to be the Qur’an if it is in its original Arabic. All translations into other languages are merely “interpretations” and inexact facsimiles.

This is an admirable attempt to preserve fidelity in transmission, though one wonders if even this devotion to the original text isn’t a case of closing the barn door after the mule is gone. For the special value of a living mystic or prophet is the dynamic nature of their expression of the Real, to which they have access. The Qur’an’s words in the absence of Muhammad’s living interpretation, like Jesus’s parables without his own commentary, are susceptible to a dogmatic crystallisation induced by the limited understanding of later followers who risk mistaking their own piety for insight.

One early attempt within Islam to head off a decline in religious practice following Muhammad’s death, was the collection and preservation of hadiths (quotations from the Prophet), among which are the hadiths qudsi (Prophetic quotations conveying messages from God, given outside of Qur’anic passages). Hadiths typically contain testimonies, by the Prophet’s companions, of Muhammad’s suggestions and judgments on the details of daily life and specific questions of practice, law or family concerns. The hadiths qudsi are understood to provide an extra-Qura’nic source of Divine guidance. A secondary source of information is the “Sunna,” a recording of the Prophet’s own personal habits and practices, including quite intimate reports by his wives.

Unfortunately, even preserving the specifics of the Prophet’s interpretations, insights and behaviours still finds them anchored to their time and place. At the same time, there is much dispute over various hadiths’ authenticity, with many being suspected of later manufacture for partisan purposes.

Islam’s institutionalisation, once the Prophet was gone, saw Muhammad defined as the most perfect exemplar of Islam, with all questions of right behaviour and scriptural meaning referred back to his own statements and behaviour, or to the Qur’an. The best means that later Ulema (scholars and jurists) could suggest in rendering decisions was “analogy” and “consensus of the community” – processes that have left little room for creative insights or inspired interpretations.

Because Muhammad served his community as resident mystic, prophet, commander in chief, and social arbiter, Islam – again, in taking him as its exemplar – developed an ideal of theocratic rule as its civilisation grew. As in Medieval Christianity, there was little sense of separate spheres for religion and civil society – Islam was “a way of life.” The combined figure of Sultan (Ruler) and Caliph (Religious leader), though hardly consistent throughout the succession of Islamic empires, was in place in the final centuries of the Ottoman Empire, only to collapse along with the implosion of the Ottomans following WWI. The Caliphate was abolished by Ataturk in his effort to constitute a secular Turkish republic on the ruins of the Empire.

The inroads made by European colonialism in the waning decades of the Ottomans, and particularly post-WWI, helped stir the pot of Arab nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and radical Islam, all of which arose in response to the splintering of Islamic civilisation. There was no single Islamic solution put forth that commanded universal support. A multitude of Islams, ethnic nationalisms, and dictatorial regimes carried the day.

It is this sequence of events that brings us to the present reality of a decentralised and dispirited Islamic world mourning its former glories, riven along nationalist and sectarian lines, resentful of previous Western colonialism, and defensive towards an encroaching globalisation that promises to be more pervasive and invasive than mere colonialism ever was.

The lightning rod for Muslim resentment towards this state of affairs has come to be symbolised, for better or worse, in the creation of Israel, in what was previously Palestine. What was seen by Jews as a refuge from Nazi persecution, and by the Zionists as the fulfilment of a scriptural and political dream, was seen by many Muslims as an exclusionary Western wedge, achieved by Haganah, Irgun, and Stern Gang terrorism: an ethnically-defined state disenfranchising its former residents, and a surrogate for the present Western superpower, the USA. The Israeli/Palestinian blood-feud, terrible enough in itself, has metastasised throughout the Muslim body, taxing the Islamic immune system, and readily diagnosed as the underlying Western cancer which can be blamed for every painful social malady.

As stated at the beginning, ironies abound. The very virtue that enables millions of Muslims to feel a brotherhood across national and racial divides – the sense of an Umma (community) of believers – also fuels the presumption of extremist Islamic terrorists to represent the whole of Islam in their assault on the West. In truth, bin Laden and Co. (or Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah) no more represent Islam than the judicially-selected Bush regime represents the whole of Western democracy. Behind each camp’s stated purposes and PR, loom the reptilian brain’s Will to Power – the opposite of the mystic’s realisation and of the stated goal of most religions: surrender to the will of God.

Religion, devoid of the mystic’s link to the Real, may not save us – in fact when religion is used as a rationale to wage political warfare, it may condemn us to a hell on earth of its own creation. But that doesn’t mean that we should turn our backs on the spiritual impulse toward realisation and human perfection that lies at the root of religion. The survival of Sufism within the broader confines of Islam is a significant case in point.

Sufism is a term coined by Western orientalists for the mystical path in Islam, commonly known as tasawwuf by Muslims. I’ll continue to use it here for the sake of simplicity. Sufism isn’t a sect or subgroup within Islam, so much as it is an expression of the mystical understanding underlying Islam.

Despite Muhammad’s roles of prophet, commander in chief, and social arbiter, it was his vocation as mystic that preceded and subsumed his other responsibilities. According to Sufi tradition, Muhammad acknowledged Ali, his nephew and son in law, as his spiritual successor, i.e., as the one Muslim within his inner circle who had also been blessed with a potent mystical awakening. Because the roles of spiritual and political leader had been combined in Muhammad, they became the object of the power struggles following the Prophet’s death. Those struggles eventually resulted in the division between Sunni and Shia Islam, though that need not concern us here. Suffice it to say, that for most Sufis, Ali represents the continuation of the mystical impulse within Islam, and nearly all Sufi brotherhoods trace their initiatory lineage back to Ali.

The operating premise of Sufism is that the mystical consciousness (but not the Prophetic role) of the Prophet and Ali is possible for others. The encounter with the Real – in which the dynamic paradox of the Infinite and the finite, the Absolute and the particular is known and experienced – is not relegated to the distant past or possessed by a designated few, but is within the capacity of everyone, should they so desire.

Authentic mystics have usually occupied a position in tension with established religion, because their dynamic relationship with the Infinite has often placed them at cross-purposes to the theological certainties promulgated by religious authorities. It is to Islam’s credit that it made more room for its mystics than did Christianity, its chief rival. This leeway was sometimes due to the patronage of Sultans who were interested in tasawwuf, and sometimes due to the popular support that some saints enjoyed. This is not to say that Sufis were always honoured or even tolerated. They were sometimes persecuted as heretics, executed or merely silenced; but whether welcomed or deplored, they were able to pass along their wisdom and methods from generation to generation.

The predominant means of this transmission was through Sufi brotherhoods or Orders (tariqas) – caretakers of continuous lines of teaching methods derived from the founding inspiration of a particular mystic. Unlike Christian contemplative monastic orders that demanded celibacy and a sequestered life, the Sufi tariqas were generally composed of everyday people, with families and outside professions. Thus, up to the present, the Sufis have provided a street-level access to mystical experience.

Jalaluddin Rumi, whose mystical poetry has enjoyed great popularity in the West in recent years, is the best known representative of Sufism. His emphasis on Love as the key entry-point to communion with the Divine has led many people to assume that this is true of all Sufism. However, just as Yoga can be subdivided into several parallel paths to the Divine, including Hatha (physical), Jnana (mental), Bhakti (devotional), etc., so each Sufi order has its own flavour and emphasis, derived from its founding saint. Still, whatever their emphasis or methods, all Sufis share the ultimate goal of a spiritual awakening or “opening,” where the seeker comes to intimate knowledge of the Real.

This may sound terribly remote from anything of practical value, especially if one imagines this awakening to be a state of everlasting bliss which renders its recipient incapable of dealing with mundane affairs. However, Sufism teaches the need for the mystic to “descend” again into daily life, where he can function in normal situations while maintaining an expanded awareness. This is truly the path of Muhammad, who from the mystical point of view stands as exemplar for the “completed human:” one who is both physically and spiritually alive, and able to interpret his own Qur’an.

Such individuals light the way for others, often serving inconspicuously as conduits of inspiration and encouragement. A pharmacist in Istanbul, a shopkeeper in Fez, a poet in Damascus – there is no predicting where one may find those who are called “friends of God.”

Fundamentalist movements originate out of a form of spiritual inspiration themselves. Despairing of the decadence and corruption they perceive in the present expression of their Faith, the fundamentalists – as their name suggests – try to return to the pure fundamentals.

For “religions of the Book” – religions based on revealed scriptures – this commonly takes the form of cleaving even closer to scriptural authority. But rejecting the succeeding centuries of religious evolution, and not privy to dynamic interpretation of the founder or of mystics, the fundamentalists commonly opt for the most literal readings of their holy texts. And when those texts are as ambiguous and nuanced as the Qur’an, this can lead to confusion and incoherence, thinly veiled by rigidity.

The result is a proliferation of mini-Caliphs or Popes, certain of their own purity and the truth of their interpretation, cut off from scholarly commentary and discourse, and contemptuous and dismissive of all who disagree. In eras of profound change and discord, the fundamentalists reduce the Infinite Source of Being to a static icon created in their own image, in a tragic reversal of the creative process.

Those who kill and terrorise in the name of God demonstrate their own distance from any real connectedness with the Whole. This is the dilemma of Islam at the dawn of the 21st century. The Umma of believers are themselves held hostage by the terrorists who claim to represent them. As Zia Sardar has written in The Observer (UK – Sept 23, 2001): “. . . all good and concerned Muslims are implicated in the unchecked rise of fanaticism in Muslim societies. . . . We have been silent as they proclaim themselves martyrs, mangling beyond recognition the most sacred meaning of what it is to be a Muslim. . . . The terrorists are among us, the Muslim communities of the world. . . . And it is our duty to stand up against them.”

The Prophet affirmed that “Allah’s Mercy supersedes his Wrath.” (Hadith al-Qudsi). One can only hope that the moderate Muslim majority will draw upon the wisdom of those within their own tradition who know that Mercy intimately and find the courage to stand up.

_________________________________________________________

© Jay Kinney, 2001. Jay Kinney is the co-author, with Richard Smoley, of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (Quest Books, 2006). He is editor of The Inner West: An introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West (Tarcher/Penguin. 2004). His next book, The Masonic Enigma, will be published by HarperSanFrancisco in 2007.

From New Dawn Magazine…

_____________________

Poetry: William Blake

THE VOICE OF THE ANCIENT BARD

Youth of delight! come hither

And see the opening morn,

Image of Truth new-born.

Doubt is fled, and clouds of reason,

Dark disputes and artful teazing.

Folly is an endless maze;

Tangled roots perplex her ways;

How many have fallen there!

They stumble all night over bones of the dead;

And feel–they know not what but care;

And wish to lead others, when they should be led.

—

THE GARDEN OF LOVE

I laid me down upon a bank,

Where Love lay sleeping;

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

—

THE HUMAN ABSTRACT

Pity would be no more

If we did not make somebody poor,

And Mercy no more could be

If all were as happy as we.

And mutual fear brings Peace,

Till the selfish loves increase;

Then Cruelty knits a snare,

And spreads his baits with care.

He sits down with holy fears,

And waters the ground with tears;

Then Humility takes its root

Underneath his foot.

Soon spreads the dismal shade

Of Mystery over his head,

And the caterpillar and fly

Feed on the Mystery.

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,

Ruddy and sweet to eat,

And the raven his nest has made

In its thickest shade.

The gods of the earth and sea

Sought through nature to find this tree,

But their search was all in vain:

There grows one in the human Brain.